Is Okonkwo a Tragic Hero?

Destiny Bobb
Mrs. Marchione
CB English 10
10 June 2014
Things Fall Apart Final Essay Sometimes striving to be the best can lead to ones timely demise. A tragic hero is a great man, he’s noble, yet he stills has that one flaw that makes him relatable to the audience. If you can find a tragic hero in a story, it is called a tragedy. A tragedy is a drama in which the tragic hero comes to a disastrous end. The story involves a tribe in Nigeria and a great respected leader who ends up where he never thought he would. Keeping all of these characteristics in mind, the story Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a prime example of a tragedy. Even the books main character, Okonkwo, is what you could call a tragic hero. Things Fall Apart is clearly a tragedy because the protagonist was a man of greatness who met a disastrous end. Okonkwo started with barley anything. And from that nothing he built a well working farm in which he supported his nicely sized family, three wives and many children. He was able to obtain one of the highest titles in Umuofia becoming one of the egwugwu. Even with all this fame and glory Okonkwo started to fall off “his rocker”. His village was beginning to be colonized by the British. Okonkwo, being the tempered and stubborn person he is, he could no longer handle his culture being ripped out from right underneath of him. “The only sound they made was with their feet as they crushed dry leaves. Then they came to the tree from which Okonkwo’s body was dangling, and they stopped dead” (207). Seeing the story of Okonkwo proves that the novel, Things Fall Apart, is indeed a tragedy. Okonkwo was a man of high stature who was well respected and looked up to in his village Umuofia. Yet every tragic hero has that one thing that makes him not so perfect, and for Okonkwo, one could say that would be his anger. Okonkwo had a very short fuse and he showed it whenever things did not seem to go his way. “He walked back to his obi to await Ojiugo’s return. And when she returned he beat her heavily” (29). Obviously there were other ways of handling this situation but Okonkwo, being the short fuse he is, could not show his anger any other way then by beating his wife. According to Aristotle, a tragic hero’s death shows a waste of human potential, and Okonkwo’s death is an example of this. If it was not for Okonkwo’s untimely death he could have done so much more in his life, even more than he had already done. Although Okonkwo’s story makes the novel look like a tragedy and Okonkwo himself look like a tragic hero, either of them fully adhere to their definitions. For a tragedy to be a tragedy the main character must come from a noble birth, which Okonkwo did not. Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, was a lazy individual. The clansmen of Umuofia did not pay much respect to him because he owed everybody and their uncle money and he did not provide well for his family. “When Unoka died he had taken no title at all and he was heavily in debt” (8). By his laziness he did not teach Okonkwo the responsible way of living his life. The fact that Okonkwo happened to be born to Unoka proves that he was not one of nobleness. To get this show on the road, Okonkwo’s story should be considered a tragedy and Okonkwo himself a tragic hero. When one starts to read the novel they start to form a mindset that Okonkwo was a great man and deserved to be looked up to. As the book progresses we see his tragic flaw start to come out when he starts to beats his wives and kill a young boy. But just like any rollercoaster Okonkwo did have his ups and downs but should still be considered a tragic hero and in turn the book be considered a tragedy. With Okonkwo’s obsession of trying to not be like his father he almost became compulsive and determined to show his manliness and his aggressive nature. This, ultimately led to his downfall and caused him to make the final decision to climb that tree on the last fateful day of his life.