SOURCE: “The Plight of a Hero in Achebe's Things Fall Apart,” in College Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring, 2000, pp. 146–56.

In the following essay, Nnoromele addresses the question of why the character Okonkwo fails at the end of Things Fall Apart and asserts that Achebe acted as a neutral narrator throughout the novel.

Although Things Fall Apart remains the most widely read African novel, the failure of its hero continues to generate haunting questions in the minds of some of its readers, especially among those who seem to identify with the hero's tragedy. Central to this discomfort is the question: why did Achebe choose as his hero an aspiring but brutal young man who ultimately took his own life? The author himself acknowledges that he has “been asked this question in one form or another by a certain kind of reader for thirty years” (Lindfors 1991, 22).¹ According to Achebe, these readers...