SOURCE: “Rhythm and Narrative Method in Achebe's Things Fall Apart,” in Novel, Vol. 18, No. 3, Spring, 1985, pp. 243–56.

In the following essay, McCarthy explores Achebe's use of the English language in Things Fall Apart to simulate the oral quality of African storytelling.

Before the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958 public awareness in the West of fiction from Africa was confined chiefly to white writers such as Doris Lessing, Alan Paton, or Nadine Gordimer. Thus Achebe's first novel, written in English, though he is himself a Nigerian of the Igbo people, was a notable event. More noteworthy was the fact that it was a very good novel and has become over the years probably the most widely read and talked about African novel, overshadowing the efforts of other West African novelists as well as those of East and South Africa. Its reputation began high and has remained so...