eBook details
- Title: Undignified Details: The Colonial Subject of Law (Law, Literature, Postcoloniality)
- Author : Ariel
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 209 KB
Description
At the end of Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, readers find the narrative abandoned and replaced with another story. The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a man from the Nigerian tribe of Umuofia who, despite a destitute upbringing, becomes one of the most powerful leaders of his clan. Achebe's protagonist, however, is anything but an endearing hero. Haunted by the memory of his poor and hapless father, Okonkwo becomes a proud, short-tempered man, who beats his wives and treats those around him with a hard-edged lack of sympathy. The novel concludes with the arrival of Christian missionaries from England, who convert members of Okonkwo's clan, establish a church, and eventually set up a court. Following an altercation with the priest and some of the church's converts, Okonkwo and five other men are arrested and beaten. After their release, the clan calls a meeting, which is interrupted by the guards who had earlier imprisoned and beaten the men. This intrusion proves more than Okonkwo can bear: overcome with humiliation and rage, he confronts one of the guards and kills him. The chapter that follows this episode shifts from Okonkwo's point of view to that of the unnamed District Commissioner, who comes to the village in search of the guard's murderer and is led by the clansmen to a tree from which Okonkwo's body hangs. The tragedy of his suicide would seem to be a natural place for Achebe's novel to end. Instead, Things Fall Apart concludes with the beginning of another story, which announces itself in the omniscient narrator's shift in focus from Okonkwo to the District Commissioner. Reframing Okonkwo's narrative from within the Commissioner's perspective, the narrator concludes the story from the subject position of a man who knows nothing of Okonkwo save the scant facts of the messenger's murder and the murderer's suicide. As the newly anointed protagonist leaves deep in thought about how the dead man's story might enter the wider colonial picture, Achebe's title and the novel's epigraph from Yeats' poem "The Second Coming"--"things fall apart, the center cannot hold"--acquires new force, inflected with the strained power relations of colonialism. In these moments, the man we had taken to be the novel's central figure is undone, and becomes little more than a small, anonymous part in a very different story: