Things Far Apart By Chinua Achebe

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 12th grade July 2001

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My Reaction to "Things Fall Apart"� Most of the work of the modern literary age is an attempt to leave the reader feeling uplifted. It is a rare opportunity to be able to read a piece of literature that makes us reflect upon the values of our society and how our society developed. Reading Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart"� is one of these rare opportunities. The novel was able gave a better understanding of why modern Africa has developed in the unique way that it has, since its colonization. Achebe was inspired by the poem "The Second Coming"� by William Butler Yeats, which also details the fall of society do to foreign revelation.

Many aspects of the poem "The Second Coming"� are similar to Achebe's book.

One of the most egregious examples of this is the line, "When the ceremony of the innocence is drowned. This line relates to the book in that the natives lost their innocence when the colonizers contaminated the native society with western tools.

Take for example the introduction of the gun, which resulted in the accidental murder of one native by another, the subsequent exile of the protagonist, and henceforth the symbolic drowning of innocence in Umuofia. The second through fourth line of the poem starts "the falcon cannot hear the falconer"� and concludes with, "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."� These lines are significant, not just because the third contains the name of the book, but because they somewhat mirror the plot of the book. The falcon is the native people, the falconer is their culture and intrinsically within it that culture lays their religion. The missionaries and their foreign revelations tempt the falcon with western promise, in the end anarchy reigns when the native ways are the people can...