Things Fall Apart: Part 1

I found myself deeply interested in the story that Achebe is telling here. The difference in culture is the greatest draw for me, because I am completely relying on the words within the story to formulate an image in my mind of what is happening. I agree with some others in the class, however, that it is difficult to keep the names of the characters sorted correctly when I am unsure of how to pronounce them in the first place. Although I greatly appreciate that names have so much importance, and that each character's name means something that was either defined by their life, or will define their life. Many of my friends have their names merely because their parents just liked the way it sounds, and not because it has any sort of important meaning.

As I read, I tried to keep the concepts from Orality and Literacy in the back of my mind, and recognize them when I came across them in Achebe. The Ibo (or Igbo) culture that Achebe writes about greatly values language and orality. Achebe writes, "among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten" (p6). As we read, we learn that this culture highly values proverbs as a way to dictate life, and use story telling/narrative as a primary method of communicating life lessons. Parents don't just tell their children not to do things because they are bad, they tell stories about animals or insects who have done these things and what happened to them. At several points in the story, women are mentioned telling stories to their children around a fire, and children even telling stories to other children.

In America, we sit around on our couch or next to our children's beds and read them stories from books. Oral stories are passed down generation to generation, each person learning the stories so that they might share the same lessons with their children. Although we occasionally pass down the books that our parents read to us to our own children, with such a high frequency of new stories being written, it is unnecessary to pass down stories in order for our children to learn the same lessons that we learned as kids. I found it particularly interesting that in oral cultures, stories are a necessity to life. Narrative matters. Whereas in American culture (at least in regard to my own family), stories are told for entertainment value more than anything else.

Because of Orality and Literacy, I was looking for interesting aspects of the narrative that I could analyze as a development of literacy. The way in which Achebe tells his story makes for a lack of building action to climax, but it does give a lot of background information. Each chapter begins in the past, with a separate event, and then as the story gets filled in, it slowly connects to the present in which the story is being told. Little by little, a lot of information is gleaned about Okonkwo and why the present story matters. It is an interesting way to tell a story, and I noticed that many of my favorite books are told that way. For example, I am presently re-reading Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home," which is a graphic memoir, and each chapter beings in a similar fashion.