Gabriella
Chavez
English
201
Elizabeth
Whitley
As children grow up they look up to
their fathers and hope to be just like them and work towards that. Especially a
son will look up to his father the most but what happens when the father was
not such a great role model. In Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo’s
father Unoko was not very successful, he many debts, was very lazy and died
without a title. Okonkwo struggled with not being anything like his father that
it also affected his own son Nwoye, who in his eyes was very weak and lazy. The
relationship between a father and his son is crucial because it will affect
their own child in the future.
Unoko, Okonkwo’s father was often
laughed at because he was very poor and barely had enough money to feed his
family and was a loafer. (Achebe,5) He kept on piling more debt and never
paying people back, which is embarrassing to his family. Unoko dies without a
title to his name, which means he is remembered for nothing, but a man who had
lots of debt and was lazy. This angered Okonkwo so much that he set out to
never be like his father and to be strong and die with a title to his name. It
is quite extraordinary how he grew his own yam farm when it was once nothing
and how we raised his family with his 3 wives and children as well.
Okonkwo’s son Nwoye was the eldest of
all his children and was expected to be very strong and tough but was actually
very emotional and lazy. Okonkwo despised this aspect of his son and did not
want him to be a failure like Unoko so he would beat him whenever he showed any
type of emotion or lazyness. Okonkwo believed firmly on showing nothing but strength
“To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating
was strength”. (Achebe,28) Okonkwo’s way of thinking comes from his father
because father was not very strong he was lazy and not got anything done.
When The Oracle tell Okonkwo to take in
Ikemefuna in and make him a part of his family. Nwoye got very close to
Ikemefuna and saw him as a brother. Later on in the story The Oracle decides
Ikemefuna’s fate and wants him murdered, Nwoye hears of this by his father and
cries. ”Nwoye overheard it and burst out into tears, where upon his father beat
him heavily”( Achebe,57). Okonkwo has said “there is too much of his mother in
him” (Achebe,66) he hated that emotional and lazy side of Nwoye because it
reminded him too much of Unoka as well as Nwoye’s mother.
All of Okonkwo’s hard abusive ways of
fathering eventually did get to Nwoye so much that he sought out to another way
of living. When the christian missionaries came to the villages and were trying
to get people to follow their religion, Okonkwo despised all of this and that
people were following this religion. When Obierika sees that Nwoye is with the
missionaries and is in complete shock and speaks to him of his father. Nwoye
says “I don’t know. He is not my father”. (Achebe, 144) At this point Nwoye was
so upset with his father always bringing him down and never being able to meet
up to his expectations he went another direction. When Okonkwo hears of this
news he is very upset and when Nwoye walks into their obi he attacks him with
fury by gripping him by the neck. (Achebe,151) Nwoye leaves his father and is
happy about it and he goes off to a school to help him learn how to write and
read.
After all Okonkwo tried to make his son
into a strong emotionless man it failed because he was too abusive and mean to
Nwoye. The reason Okonkwo was like this to Nwoye was because of Unoko, he did
not want anyone in his family to end up that way. He had such a hard way of showing
emotion that in the end he lost his own fight, which it did not have to end
that way.
Works Cited
Achebe,
Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor, 1994. Print.
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