Fear In Things Fall Apart

Fear can drive us to do many things, sometimes heroic, and yet often malicious. In Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, the main character, Okonkwo, has a driving fear behind his actions that causes him to do harm to others and himself. This fear was cultivated by his environment, and it grew to a place where he uses his ever present fears as a justification for his often violent actions.

Fear has always dominated Okonkwo’s life because he has never wanted to show weakness like his father before him. In the early chapters of the novel we learn that in Okonkwo’s childhood, a playmate calls his father agbala. “That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only a name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had not taken a
When it is decided that Ikemefuna, who has started to address Okonkwo as ‘Father’, is to be killed, Okonkwo goes with the procession, even when he is told he doesn’t have to. And when the moment finally comes, “Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak”(65). This is one of the most direct examples of Okonkwo's fear ultimately harming others in the whole narrative. It's shockingly gritty and stoic--a boy who calls him father has been killed at his hand, and he knows why he has done it. This kind of grim realization that his fear would go so far as to kill a boy he has come to love is poignant and immensely disheartening, and that is why Achebe includes it. Okonkwo fully understands that the reason he has harmed this helpless boy was his internalized fear, but the current runs so deep that he can't go back and improve upon
After the white men come into the community of Umuofia, Okonkwo is extremely angry with the state of affairs, and after he is captured (and ultimately freed), this anger only convalesces. Climactically, he beheads one of the Europeans, seeing that no one else will do anything about this. “Okonkwo stood looking at the dead man. He knew Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He discerned fright in that tumult,”(189). In the very next chapter we it is revealed that Okonkwo has committed suicide. What is interesting about this excerpt is that Okonkwo recognizes the fear in the upheaval. In the beginning of the quotation he fears the future of his beloved war state, knowing that they wouldn't go to war and feeling betrayed by that realization. And then when he recognizes the fear in the people, it triggers a complex within him that says that he is always fearful, but now that the village is also fearful it is ten times worse. This is what drives him over the edge. He can be ruled by fear, but once his people are, it is clear that all hope has been lost. Okonkwo can't comprehend even the most familiar of things in his life, and this, with dark truth, literally scares him to