Things Fall Apart: Part Two

1. How is Okonkwo affected by his exile?

Okonkwo is given a piece of land to work in his motherland, although he doesn’t seem to be as enthusiastic as he would have been when he worked on land when he was younger. “But it was like beginning life anew without the vigour and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.” (p.96) It is possible to appreciate that Okonkwo starts to feel powerless and tired, because his life doesn’t have a real purpose now. He had to start over from zero, and he does manage to achieve it through the help of his kinsmen and family.

After his exile, we can infer that he feels useless and unmotivated, because everything he had worked for up to now. “That had been his life-spring. (…) He had been cast out of his clan like a fish on to a dry, sandy beach…”(p.96) Through the use of a simile, we can observe how alienated the protagonist feels by having to live in his mother’s land. He feels that he doesn’t belong there, maybe because of its connection to a feminine side of him that, up to that moment, he did not want to accept.

2. How is Nwoye affected?

Nwoye decides to join the missionaries, brought to this land by the white men. When the evangelist talks to the tribe about Catholicism and its beliefs, everyone burst into laughter and felt deceived, but Okonkwo’s son was captivated. “He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.”(p.108) Nwoye is hungry for answers, he starts to feel that this new religion is going to be able to fix him and that it will answer the questions he couldn’t find the answer to. 

3. How does their relationship change?

The relationship between Okonkwo and Nwoye is obviously affected by the fact that his son has, basically, betrayed his own culture and joined the missionaries and their new religion, adoring their new God. When Okonkwo is asked about his son, he doesn’t seem to want to mention him at all, allowing us to recognize the confinement that the protagonist has submitted his son to. They become more split and distant, even more than what they were after Okonkwo had taken part in Ikemefuna’s death.

When Nwoye starts to frequent the church that had been built in the Evil Forest, Okonkwo finds out and he harms his son, demanding answers from him. This event acts as the final distancing between Okonkwo and Nwoye, because the latter leaves to a school somewhere in Umuofia to learn how to write and read. 

4. Predict the end of the book.

It is possible that when Okonkwo returns to his village, something similar to what happened to the Abame tribe occurs to the Igbo tribe. Since there has been a gradual, but significant, increase in the people converted to catholicism, it could be some kind of foreshadowing of an invasion lead by the white men.