Research Paper /Format After you have chosen which theme or themes you want to apply to your research paper and have completed your sentence outline ( an outline of the theme from the article or essay you chose), you are to start looking for that theme in the novel or selection and how it is presented or represented.. Since your research paper is a literary analysis paper, you will be looking for how your particular theme works in the novel/selection once you begin your paper. I suggest that you do not attempt to work on the paper until you have a clear and concise understanding of your theme and have read the entire novel/selection. Make sure you mark significant passages in your novel/selection that will help to strengthen your argument. Always introduce your direct quotation, paraphrase and summary. Also make sure you comment afterwards. By doing this introduction and commentary, your voice will be sure to be heard in the paper.Make sure you remain as objective as possible. Note using the first person “I” in a paper makes it subjective. The second person “you” is not an indefinite pronoun. A useful pronoun to use is “one” then follow it with “s/he.” Or make the subject plural and follow it with “they.”The length of your paper should be 6-8 full pages for ENGL 102 and 8-10 for Humanities with the Works Cited page not counting as one of those pages.7All pages should be numbered beginning with the first and ending with the Works Cited page. Papers are to be submitted in Word 97-2003.For a paper this length you should have at least 6 sources. Three of these sources must be critical, from a collection of essays or an article in a refereed journal. A refereed journal is a journal that specializes in the topic where the paper has been sent to at least three of the author’s peers and then published. Do not use Wikipedia as a source. You may use it as a means to obtain a clear and precise idea of you topic. Sometimes Wikipedia will give you a link to a credible source that you may be able to use.If you do a cover page, MLA dictates that an outline of the paper should follow. You will be turning all materials into me in a portfolio on the due date. Do not bold, underline or italicize your titles, and please try to be creative with them.10JSTOR, MLA Bibliography, ABELL and Eric (Ebsco) are just a few of the databases where you can obtain a refereed article. They are under Literature and Languages via of research port. They are online databases that you can retrieve from the University Library homepage.
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Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
First published in 1959
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things Fall Apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
–W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
CHAPTER ONE
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame
rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought
honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler
who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat
because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a
fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town
engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.
The drums beat and the flutes sang and the spectators held their breath.
Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water. Every
nerve and every muscle stood out on their arms, on their backs and their thighs, and one
almost heard them stretching to breaking point. In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat.
That was many years ago, twenty years or more, and during this time Okonkwo’s
fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan. He was tall and huge, and his bushy
eyebrows and wide nose gave him a very severe look. He breathed heavily, and it was
said that, when he slept, his wives and children in their houses could hear him breathe.
When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on
springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite
often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words
out quickly enough, he would use his fists. He had no patience with unsuccessful men.
He had had no patience with his father.
Unoka, for that was his father’s name, had died ten years ago. In his day he was
lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow. If any
money came his way, and it seldom did, he immediately bought gourds of palm-wine,
called round his neighbours and made merry. He always said that whenever he saw a
dead man’s mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one’s lifetime. Unoka
was, of course, a debtor, and he owed every neighbour some money, from a few cowries
to quite substantial amounts.
He was tall but very thin and had a slight stoop. He wore a haggard and
mournful look except when he was drinking or playing on his flute. He was very good
on his flute, and his happiest moments were the two or three moons after the harvest
when the village musicians brought down their instruments, hung above the fireplace.
Unoka would play with them, his face beaming with blessedness and peace. Sometimes
another village would ask Unoka’s band and their dancing egwugwu to come and stay
with them and teach them their tunes. They would go to such hosts for as long as three
or four markets, making music and feasting. Unoka loved the good hire and the good
fellowship, and he loved this season of the year, when the rains had stopped and the sun
rose every morning with dazzling beauty. And it was not too hot either, because the cold
and dry harmattan wind was blowing down Irom the north. Some years the harmattan
was very severe and a dense haze hung on the atmosphere. Old men and children would
then sit round log fires, warming their bodies. Unoka loved it all, and he loved the first
kites that returned with the dry season, and the children who sang songs of welcome to
them. He would remember his own childhood, how he had often wandered around
looking for a kite sailing leisurely against the blue sky. As soon as he found one he
would sing with his whole being, welcoming it back from its long, long journey, and
asking it if it had brought home any lengths of cloth.
That was years ago, when he was young. Unoka, the grown-up, was a failure. He
was poor and his wife and children had barely enough to eat. People laughed at him
because he was a loafer, and they swore never to lend him any more money because he
never paid back. But Unoka was such a man that he always succeeded in borrowing
more, and piling up his debts.
One day a neighbour called Okoye came in to see him. He was reclining on a
mud bed in his hut playing on the flute. He immediately rose and shook hands with
Okoye, who then unrolled the goatskin which he carried under his arm, and sat down.
Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing
a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk.
“I have kola,” he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his
guest.
“Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it,”
replied Okoye, passing back the disc.
“No, it is for you, I think,” and they argued like this for a few moments before
Unoka accepted the honour of breaking the kola. Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of
chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.
As he broke the kola, Unoka prayed to their ancestors for life and health, and for
protection against their enemies. When they had eaten they talked about many things:
about the heavy rains which were drowning the yams, about the next ancestral feast and
about the impending war with the village of Mbaino. Unoka was never happy when it
came to wars. He was in fact a coward and could not bear the sight of blood. And so he
changed the subject and talked about music, and his face beamed. He could hear in his
mind’s ear the blood-stirring and intricate rhythms of the ekwe and the udu and the
ogene, and he could hear his own flute weaving in and out of them, decorating them
with a colourful and plaintive tune. The total effect was gay and brisk, but if one picked
out the flute as it went up and down and then broke up into short snatches, one saw that
there was sorrow and grief there.
Okoye was also a musician. He played on the ogene. But he was not a failure
like Unoka. He had a large barn full of yams and he had three wives. And now he was
going to take the Idemili title, the third highest in the land. It was a very expensive
ceremony and he was gathering all his resources together. That was in fact the reason
why he had come to see Unoka. He cleared his throat and began: “Thank you for the
kola. You may have heard of the title I intend to take shortly.”
Having spoken plainly so far, Okoye said the next half a dozen sentences in
proverbs. Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs
are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for
a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally. In short, he was asking
Unoka to return the two hundred cowries he had borrowed from him more than two
years before. As soon as Unoka understood what his friend was driving at, he burst out
laughing. He laughed loud and long and his voice rang out clear as the ogene, and tears
stood in his eyes. His visitor was amazed, and sat speechless. At the end, Unoka was
able to give an answer between fresh outbursts of mirth.
“Look at that wall,” he said, pointing at the far wall of his hut, which was rubbed
with red earth so that it shone. “Look at those lines of chalk,” and Okoye saw groups of
short perpendicular lines drawn in chalk. There were five groups, and the smallest group
had ten lines. Unoka had a sense of the dramatic and so he allowed a pause, in which he
took a pinch of snuff and sneezed noisily, and then he continued: “Each group there
represents a debt to someone, and each stroke is one hundred cowries. You see, I owe
that man a thousand cowries. But he has not come to wake me up in the morning for it. I
shall pay you, but not today. Our elders say that the sun will shine on those who stand
before it shines on those who kneel under them. I shall pay my big debts first.” And he
took another pinch of snuff, as if that was paying the big debts first. Okoye rolled his
goatskin and departed.
When Unoka died he had taken no title at all and he was heavily in debt. Any
wonder then that his son Okonkwo was ashamed of him? Fortunately, among these
people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his
father. Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but he had won
fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages. He was a wealthy farmer and had two
barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife. To crown it all he had taken two
titles and had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars. And so although
Okonkwo was still young, he was already one of the greatest men of his time. Age was
respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child
washed his hands he could eat with kings. Okonkwo had clearly washed his hands and
so he ate with kings and elders. And that was how he came to look after the doomed lad
who was sacrificed to the village of Umuofia by their neighbours to avoid war and
bloodshed. The ill-fated lad was called Ikemefuna.
CHAPTER TWO
Okonkwo had just blown out the palm-oil lamp and stretched himself on his bamboo
bed when he heard the ogene of the town crier piercing the still night air. Gome, gome,
gome, gome, boomed the hollow metal. Then the crier gave his message, and at the end
of it beat his instrument again. And this was the message. Every man of Umuofia was
asked to gather at the market place tomorrow morning. Okonkwo wondered what was
amiss, for he knew certainly that something was amiss. He had discerned a clear
overtone of tragedy in the crier’s voice, and even now he could still hear it as it grew
dimmer and dimmer in the distance.
The night was very quiet. It was always quiet except on moonlight nights.
Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children
were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became
even more sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its name at
night, because it would hear. It was called a string. And so on this particular night as the
crier’s voice was gradually swallowed up in the distance, silence returned to the world, a
vibrant silence made more intense by the universal trill of a million million forest
insects.
On a moonlight night it would be different. The happy voices of children playing
in open fields would then be heard. And perhaps those not so young would be playing in
pairs in less open places, and old men and women would remember their youth. As the
Ibo say: “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”
But this particular night was dark and silent. And in all the nine villages of
Umuofia a town crier with his ogene asked every man to be present tomorrow morning.
Okonkwo on his bamboo bed tried to figure out the nature of the emergency – war with
a neighbouring clan? That seemed the most likely reason, and he was not afraid of war.
He was a man of action, a man of war. Unlike his father he could stand the look of
blood. In Umuofia’s latest war he was the first to bring home a human head. That was
his fifth head and he was not an old man yet. On great occasions such as the funeral of a
village celebrity he drank his palm-wine from his first human head.
In the morning the market place was full. There must have been about ten
thousand men there, all talking in low voices. At last Ogbuefi Ezeugo stood up in the
midst of them and bellowed four times, “Umuofia kwenu,” and on each occasion he
faced a different direction and seemed to push the air with a clenched fist. And ten
thousand men answered “Yaa!” each time. Then there was perfect silence. Ogbuefi
Ezeugo was a powerful orator and was always chosen to speak on such occasions. He
moved his hand over his white head and stroked his white beard. He then adjusted his
cloth, which was passed under his right arm-pit and tied above his left shoulder.
“Umuofia kwenu,” he bellowed a fifth time, and the crowd yelled in answer.
And then suddenly like one possessed he shot out his left hand and pointed in the
direction of Mbaino, and said through gleaming white teeth firmly clenched: “Those
sons of wild animals have dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia.” He threw his head
down and gnashed his teeth, and allowed a murmur of suppressed anger to sweep the
crowd. When he began again, the anger on his face was gone, and in its place a sort of
smile hovered, more terrible and more sinister than the anger. And in a clear
unemotional voice he told Umuofia how their daughter had gone to market at Mbaino
and had been killed. That woman, said Ezeugo, was the wife of Ogbuefi Udo, and he
pointed to a man who sat near him with a bowed head. The crowd then shouted with
ainger and thirst for blood.
Many others spoke, and at the end it was decided to follow the normal course of
action. An ultimatum was immediately dispatched to Mbaino asking them to choose
between war – on the one hand, and on the other the offer of a young man and a virgin
as compensation.
Umuofia was feared by all its neighbours. It was powerful in war and in magic,
and its priests and medicine men were feared in all the surrounding country. Its most
potent war-medicine was as old as the clan itself. Nobody knew how old. But on one
point there was general agreement–the active principle in that medicine had been an old
woman with one leg. In fact, the medicine itself was called agadi-nwayi, or old woman.
It had its shrine in the centre of Umuofia, in a cleared spot. And if anybody was so
foolhardy as to pass by the shrine after dusk he was sure to see the old woman hopping
about.
And so the neighbouring clans who naturally knew of these things feared
Umuofia, and would not go to war against it without first trying a peaceful settlement.
And in fairness to Umuofia it should be recorded that it never went to war unless its
case was clear and just and was accepted as such by its Oracle – the Oracle of the Hills
and the Caves. And there were indeed occasions when the Oracle had forbidden
Umuofia to wage a war. If the clan had disobeyed the Oracle they would surely have
been beaten, because their dreaded agadi-nwayi would never fight what the Ibo call a
fight of blame.
But the war that now threatened was a just war. Even the enemy clan knew that.
And so when Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbaino as the proud and imperious
emissary of war, he was treated with great honour and respect, and two days later he
returned home with a lad of fifteen and a young virgin. The lad’s name was Ikemefuna,
whose sad story is still told in Umuofia unto this day.
The elders, or ndichie, met to hear a report of Okonkwo’s mission. At the end
they decided, as everybody knew they would, that the girl should go to Ogbuefi Udo to
replace his murdered wife. As for the boy, he belonged to the clan as a whole, and there
was no hurry to decide his fate. Okonkwo was, therefore, asked on behalf of the clan to
look after him in the interim. And so for three years Ikemefuna lived in Okonkwo’s
household.
Qkonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the
youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children.
Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was
dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate
than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the
forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than
these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he
should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s
failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a
playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to
know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man
who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion – to hate everything
that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was
idleness.
During the planting season Okonkwo worked daily on his farms from cock-crow
until the chickens went to roost. He was a very strong man and rarely felt fatigue. But
his wives and young children were not as strong, and so they suffered. But they dared
not complain openly. Okonkwo’s first son, Nwoye, was then twelve years old but was
already causing his father great anxiety for his incipient laziness. At any rate, that was
how it looked to his father, and he sought to correct him by constant nagging and
beating. And so Nwoye was developing into a sad-faced youth.
Okonkwo’s prosperity was visible in his household. He had a large compound
enclosed by a thick wall of red earth. His own hut, or obi, stood immediately behind the
only gate in the red walls. Each of his three wives had her own hut, which together
formed a half moon behind the obi. The barn was built against one end of the red walls,
and long stacks of yam stood out prosperously in it. At the opposite end of the
compound was a shed for the goats, and each wife built a small attachment to her hut for
the hens. Near the barn was a small house, the “medicine house” or shrine where
Okonkwo kept the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits. He
worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm-wine, and offered prayers to
them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children.
So when the daughter of Umuofia was killed in Mbaino, Ikemefuna came into
Okonkwo’s household. When Okonkwo brought him home that day he called his most
senior wife and handed him over to her.
“He belongs to the clan,” he told her. “So look after him.”
“Is he staying long with us?” she asked.
“Do what you are told, woman,” Okonkwo thundered, and stammered. “When
did you become one of the ndichie of Umuofia?”
And so Nwoye’s mother took Ikemefuna to her hut and asked no more questions.
As for the boy himself, he was terribly afraid. He could not understand what was
happening to him or what he had done. How could he know that his father had taken a
hand in killing a daughter of Umuofia? All he knew was that a few men had arrived at
their house, conversing with his father in low tones, and at the end he had been taken
out and handed over to a stranger. His mother had wept bitterly, but he had been too
surprised to weep. And so the stranger had brought him, and a girl, a long, long way
from home, through lonely forest paths. He did not know who the girl was, and he never
saw her again.
CHAPTER THREE
Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men usually had. He did not
inherit a barn from his father. There was no barn to inherit. The story was told in
Umuofia, of how his father, Unoka, had gone to consult the Oracle of the Hills and the
Caves to find out why he always had a miserable harvest.
The Oracle was called Agbala, and people came from far and near to consult it.
They came when misfortune dogged their steps or when they had a dispute with their
neighbours. They came to discover what the future held for them or to consult the spirits
of their departed fathers.
The way into the shrine was a round hole at the side of a hill, just a little bigger
than the round opening into a henhouse. Worshippers and those who came to seek
knowledge from the god crawled on their belly through the hole and found themselves
in a dark, endless space in the presence of Agbala. No one had ever beheld Agbala,
except his priestess. But no one who had ever crawled into his awful shrine had come
out without the fear of his power. His priestess stood by the sacred fire which she built
in the heart of the cave and proclaimed the will of the god. The fire did not burn with a
flame. The glowing logs only served to light up vaguely …
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