Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) is widely recognized as a prominent novel in the domain of postcolonial literature. The Novel depicts the life of Igbo people who live secure, solid and self-regulated life. However, the novel makes it clear that things worsened and the whole Igbo society began to disintegrate as soon as the white man, or the colonizer made his presence in Africa. Achebe points out that the white man's proclaimed civilizing mission was devastating in the African context. This fact was due to the way the white man insisted on implementing his way of thinking and civilizing patterns to replace those of the Igbo people. In other words, the white man did not recognize and respect the culture of the Igbo people, and his reductionist and narrow-minded perspective in dealing with the local people is what causes the Igbo society to disintegrate as represented by the suicide of Okonkow, the protagonist of the novel.