Surely some revelation is at hand...

This is my second time reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Both times, the thing that struck me the most about the novel is the power and obscenity of the final chapter, the last paragraph in particular. Okonkwo's entire life, faults and virtues alike, indeed his humanity itself, is reduced to a single paragraph in a book being written by the District Commissioner called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. His experience is no more than an anecdote in an imperialist history book.

This is the most meaningful element of the novel, in my mind. The British who colonize Umuofia, imposing their religious and political institutions, give no thought to the people who have called the region home for centuries. They are merely savages to be subdued and "civilized." Achebe, purposefully, spends 207 pages detailing the tragic demise of a man and his society, and then two pages showing us what all that suffering and loss meant to the Western world: nothing.

I find the characterization of Okonkwo interesting, as well. It would be easy for Achebe to show him as an innocent, gentle soul, one who never hurt anybody and was always kind to people. Instead, the novel's protagonist is a severe, angry (even cruel) man with staggeringly destructive daddy issues. Achebe doesn't position Okonkwo as the clan's everyman, either; he clearly displays some traits that perplex and frustrate his peers. The author makes it difficult for us to sympathize with him; but sympathize we must. We know that Okonkwo is behaving how he feels he should, and Achebe is careful to tell us good things about him as well. In the end, we mourn for Okonkwo because we recognize what is universal in his life and his humanity, not because we feel great affection for him personally.

On a final note, it's significant that the novel's title comes from a line in W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," written in 1919 during the aftermath of the First World War. The poem's religious, foreboding imagery laments the decline of European aristocratic values and presumes that Western Civilization is about to be ruined and reborn. The lifted title suits Achebe's novel well; for Okonkwo and the Ibo, things do, indeed, fall apart.

P.S. Embedding is disabled for this video, but it's creative and kind of funny.