Similarities Between Septimus's Suicide And Okonkwo Suicide

The Comparison between Septimus’s Suicide and Okonkwo’s Suicide
Glory Li Tongyu
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I. Introduction
Septimus is one of the main characters in Mrs. Dalloway which is a story happened in western society after World War I, and Okonkwo is the protagonist in Things Fall Apart which is a book about the traditional African society in about 17th century. It seems like there are no connections between Septimus and Okonkwo, since they are from different eras and different social backgrounds; but in fact, both of them commit a suicide in the ending part of the story, which makes them a comparable pair. Besides, the two authors of these two books, Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe intend to let these two male characters die in the end, which emphasize
Okonkwo’s father Unoka is the representative of femininity. He loves music, he loves nature, and he knows how to enjoy life. But in the meanwhile, Unoka is “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow” (4), and “when he dies he has taken no title at all and he is heavily in debt” (8). Okonkwo is too afraid of being someone like his father; therefore, he tries his best to behave bravely and toughly, and he works hard to accumulate wealth. All what he has done is quite different from what his father did. He denies his father, and then he denies every feature his father owns including the femininity. However, his restraining himself from being feminine makes him suffer a lot. He has a deep emotion to his adopted son, Ikemefuna. Ikemefuna is brave, diligent, clever and deft; he has all good masculine features Okonkwo believes one man has to have and under his influence, Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye changes his softness and weakness into independence and toughness. So, all the people in Okonkwo’s family, including Okonkwo himself, love this young boy very much. However, life is unfair to Ikemefuna. He is force to sacrifice his young life to atone for his father’s wrong doing, and he is going to be executed by Umuofa. This is also a big strike to Okonkwo because he
Okonkwo’s suicide is ultimately because of his lacking of femininity. Psychologists have point out that an individual should not only have visible masculine traits but also have visible feminine traits, and different traits need to be shown according to different situations. A moderate possessing of femininity is one of the important facts that assure male people’s mental health. (Tao) As a traditional hero figure in his tribe, Okonkwo couldn’t realize the importance of being masculine as well as being feminine; on the contrary, he tries very hard to constrain the feminine traits in his personality, which results in his mental breakdown in the end. However, as the author, Achebe himself admits that these female traits like being kind, humorous and romantic are very valuable, and he does know the importance of femininity to a normal man. Therefore, he deliberately gives Okonkwo this suicide ending to show the society that it’s no good to possessing only masculinity; we have to give more attention to women’s merits and the feminine personalities. In this sense, Chinua Achebe gives his attention and respect to women, which shows a male writer’s strong awareness of