The Tragic Hero In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

In this essay I am going to analyse the tragic role of the central character from the novel “Things Fall Apart” written by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe in 1958, Okonkwo, who goes from having a good life and power within his clan to being a man driven to death by his misery and his misfortune. I will use the guidelines provided by Aristotle in order to demonstrate that Okonkwo falls within the tragic hero profile established by the Greek philosopher.

Aristotle defined the tragic hero archetype describing his characteristics. The philosopher suggested in his manuscript entitled “Poetics” that the hero of a tragedy should experience:

The tragic protagonist of this African novel is a tough, self-made and respected man among the Igbo clan of Umofia.

Okonkwo’s hamartia lies in his fear of becoming his father as we can infer in this fragment: “But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion – to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.” (Achebe 9,10).

So, devoid of all hope and having nothing left to live for or, better said, fight Okonkwo, the last bulwark of the almost eradicated pre-colonial culture of the Igbo clan, hangs himself on a tree, which is ironic because for him and for Igbo, suicide is described as an ‘effeminate’ act and is a great crime for their deities and ancestors:

“It is against our custom, It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offense against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his clansmen. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it” (Achebe 147).