A Long, But Interesting Passage About Okonkwo

From Solomon Iyasere’s Understanding Things Fall Apart: Selected Essays and Criticism:

Okonkwo is in fact almost always literally beyond words; he can only articulate rage, aggression and contempt, which limits both his understanding and experience and makes him impervious to Unoka’s gentle loving wisdom. His inarticulacy causes Nwoye’s alienation from the tribe and prevents Okonkwo’s enjoyment of feasts, where the main pleasure lies in conversation: “He was always uncomfortable sitting around for days waiting for a feast or getting over it” (p. 27). His lack of gentleness towards his sons contains the seeds of his own destruction; his harshness to them contrasts painfully with Unoka’s gentle words to him about the yam harvest:

Sometimes Okonkwo gave them a few yams each to prepare. But he always found fault with their effort, and he said so with much threatening. . . . Inwardly Okonkwo knew that the boys were still too young to understand fully the difficult art of preparing seed-yams. But he thought that one could not begin too early. Yam stood for manliness. (p. 23)

The final painful irony of the comparison between Okonkwo and his father is that, though they are totally dissimilar and Okonkwo despises his father, their ultimate fate is the same. Unoka “died of the swelling which was an abomination to the earth goddess” (p. 13) and so he had no burial but was left to die in the Evil Forest, pathetically tootling on his flute. Though the manner of Okonkwo’s death is quite different, a villager tells the District Commissioner, “‘It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offence against the Earth”‘ (p. 147). Again the reader is left to speculate about the link: have both characters a bad chi or personal god, which means they are fated to meet a disastrous end, or are they morally responsible for what happens to them? Both are inflexible, Okonkwo in conforming too rigorously to tribal conceptions of manliness and Unoka in refusing to conform at all.