SOURCE: “The Rhetorical Implications of the Opening and Closing of the Novel, Things Fall Apart,” in The Rhetorical Implications of Chinua Achebe's “Things Fall Apart,” University Press of America, 2000, pp. 59–68.

In the following essay, Egar provides an analysis of the opening and closing passages of Things Fall Apart.

Edward P. J. Corbett, in his Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (1971), sees rhetoric as the basis of an author's engagement with his reader, those elements or strategies through which the reader is brought to accept the world which the author has created. Herbert Read, in Art and Society (1956), states that in art, “it is not the message, but the mode of conveyance which matters” (204). These two authors see the use of rhetoric quite differently. For Corbett, rhetoric is a form of education which helps the reader recognize the writer's world or theme. For Read, rhetoric is a form of...