Things Fall Apart By Chinua Achebe - 1654 Words

â€Å"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.† [Benjamin Franklin] In the book, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo prepares for himself to fail in his later years of life. Okonkwo’s mental attitude kept him from preparing himself for success when his clan started to fall apart. Throughout the book, Okonkwo developed a personality that restricted him from accepting reality, and when his fantasy world fell apart, his lack of preparation and his attitude led him to failure. Okonkwo keeps running from all his fears instead of facing them, in the long-term this creates problems when his biggest fears return and he is unable to conquer them. The next state of mentality that caused problems was that Okonkwo could not adapt to†¦show more content†¦Chinua Achebe expressed this fear by writing, â€Å"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 god s 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.† [13] The author wrote this to show how deep down Okonkwo’s fear really was, the passage said that Okonkwo had been running from all of his fears even when he was a young child, and that he had never dealt with them. He only ran from them by doing the exact opposite of what he truly feared. Okonkwo had many fears, like his fear of compassion, and he hid from his fear of compassion by never showing sympathy for anyone and beating his family often. This type of mentality can help the reader interpret that when Okonkwo’s fears returned, at the end of the book, he was unable to overcome them, and instead he ran far enough away from them that Okonkwo saw his only way out as suicide. This exact situation happens a lot in real life as well. An example of this is, a student