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Obi's Struggle

Obi's Struggle

Obi Okonkwo was a young man born in Ibo in the eastern Nigerian village of Umuofia.   He was a well educated man who received a scholarship from the Umuofia Progressive Union (U.P.U.), to study law in England, a scholarship that he must pay back when he returns.   He eventually changes his course of study to English and abandons law.   After four years in England he returns to his native country to find more of a colonized world in which some ways he is repulsed by but has no choice in which to cope with.   Since he is an educated man, he is given a "European Post", and he works in an office in which he has no respect for their ways.   He stands strong against the bribery that goes on and is opposed to his boss, and English colonial man named Mr. Green.   Obi finds himself in a constant battle between coping with inferiority by the presence of the English and the original traditions of the world he once knew.  
Obi finds himself at the beginning of a generation of change, caught between two worlds.   He is unable to marry the woman that he loves because she is considered an outcast.   He claims to want to marry her anyway because by the time he has children, the world will have changed, and it will not matter.   Still, Obi loses his fiancée, and his mother, and finds himself in serious debt through out the novel.   He must pay back his scholarship loan and is responsible for sending money home.   Eventually, Obi breaks under all of this pressure and gives in to the bribery he had stood against, but he does not give in without feeling absolutely guilty.   Bribery is portrayed as socially acceptable to people who are in horrible situations as Obi was in, and he even claims to be done with bribery, right before he was caught.   Somehow it is too late, and his situation, his position of being caught between two shifting worlds, becomes almost impossible.   He finds himself in a downward spiral in which puts him in a place of mental turmoil.  
Language is an...