In the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, we learn about the trials and triumphs of a tribe in “uncivilized” Africa. One of the more intriguing aspects of this novel is the connection between an individual and their tribe, and what affects the strength of that connection. A boy named Nwoye follows the personality of a disenchanted soul. He, along with the other members of the tribe Umuofia, possesses a set of strings that either connect him to his culture or ties him down for it. These strings can be either strengthened or weakened based on the will of the person and the want that they have to stay connected to who they are. Okonkwo, Nwoye’s father, has unbreakable cables tying him to his culture, and his force of will allows him to grasp on to the basic traditions of his culture in such a way that it is incomprehensible to question why his culture is the way it is. Nwoye does not have the faith in his culture to allow this unquestioning acceptance. From the beginning it seems that Nwoye has been somewhat shaky in his belief system, and through a certain set of circumstances he begins to disagree with the ideologies of his tribe. Nwoye’s ropes are made of rubber bands. During a walk in the woods, Nwoye feels a snap in the connection between himself and the culture he was raised on. This snap occurs when he hears the crying of twins who had been thrown into the woods due to a basic belief shared by the people of Umuofia.These tenuous threads continue to snap as Nwoye becomes more and more disenchanted with the beliefs of Umuofia. This directly leads to what happens to Nwoye later on in this novel, because he continues to question why, and it just so happens that the new religion of Christianity, answers many of these questions. It is almost as if he becomes enthralled with this new belief system, one in which he can find little to no fault. I believe that what truly pushed him to become utterly disillusioned from his culture was the death of someone he thought of as a sort of brother. This death was ordered by the gods of his tribe, and therefore it was not disputed. Nwoye believes this to be completely unreasonable when considering that his “brother” had done nothing wrong. The strongest thread connecting Nwoye to his culture is his father. His father attempts to force the idea of their culture onto Nwoye, which only seems to push him farther away. When Okonkwo participated in the death of Nwoye’s friend’s death, he snapped the bond between them as father and son faster than any scissor could cut through a rubber band. Nwoye ends up throwing away his culture so completely that at one point he runs away with this foreign religion and eventually claims that he has no father. He has severed all ties with his past and he begins to think of himself as a newly born man, washed free of his past.
jessmichmatth 