Allusions In Things Fall Apart

“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet….” Terence McKenna. This quote is the essence of the work of Achebe as it reflects the words of Yeats. Yeats, an Irish poet whose poem “The Second Coming” tells of the evils the world will experience with the second coming of Christ, is the inspiration for the Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart. However, instead of building upon further prediction, Achebe uses the literary device of allusion to show us that it is already happening. Through the dissection of the first four lines of the poem Achebe creates a tale that shows, the falcon, the young and the people of the colonies of Europe moving away from their parents advice
Much like the relationship of the falcon and master, this relationship centers on each understanding and completing their part, when these roles are damaged or confused the results are dismal. This is what happens in the society Achebe creates in his novel. This breakdown was in fact experienced by numerous colonies across the planet after the weakening of the old imperialist powers because of WWI. Achebe uses the lines in which Yeats, a child of the age of Imperialist India, predict what will happen to the world with the end of WWI. In Achebe’s illusion his African society; suffering from a weakened social, culture, and traditional government due to forced Christian conversion and the demise of their traditional structures “falls apart” as their Western influences degrade due to their weakened.
The idea that “...things fall apart…”serves to move us to the view of the chaos theory of this novel, this departure in which the poem states “the centre cannot hold,” relates to the political part of any society. Given that government is the central authority that holds both the social and cultural parts of a society together, when it is damaged by the breakdown of the by the colonial government and too weak and broken to combat the erosion if their society chaos