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Philip Cheung
Final Paper
Native S, Ms Bost
June 21, 2009
Change in the Ibo Culture
What can change bring? Does it bring glory and new resources? Does it bring education and new ideas? For the government officials of the winning side, perhaps they would answer that society benefits from the things that they brought in. However, for character such as Okonkwo in this novel, Things Fall Apart, certainly did not look forward to the change in his village, Umuofia.
This novel is a portrait of a traditional village in Africa. Achebe was trying to remind his own people about their past, and that their history is valuable. In this novel, the protagonist, Okonkwo, is a person who known for his masculinity in the nine villages. He committed a “female crime”, a crime committed accidently, thus he is in an exile for seven years. Moreover, after he was back from his exile, he realized that everything was changed; the missionaries came in and even changed the traditional way that Ibo people think. In other words, all the things fall apart in this village and it is in a complete turbulence. In this paper, I will focus on the several major changes that occurred in the village while Okonkwo was in his exile.
Achebe hinted the reader of what is going to happen in the book by choosing the topic of the book, Things Fall Apart. In the poem, the second coming, William Butler Yeats, :
Turning and turing in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Achebe uses the opening stanza of this poem and by doing so readers are warned that poem that a chaos will happen if a society faces a collapse, “the center cannot hold”, which refers to the Ibo culture.
One of the major conflicts in the story is the idea of tradition versus change. Not only the changes in the village are typical, but also the relationship between Okonkwo and Nwoye, Okonkwo’s oldest son, stands out in this novel. The reason why the...