by Giovanni Ferri

Created on: January 14, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

The first chapter of Things Falls Apart introduces the reader to the Ibo society; Okonkwo is described as a man well known throughout the nine villages' for his solid personal achievements'[1] . Immediately the reader realises two things, firstly that Okonkwo is the novel's protagonist and secondly that the tribe appear to hold different values from our western culture. Okonkwo's fame is based primarily on winning a wrestling match against Amalinze the Cat'[2] , clearly a different standard from our society, but we also find out that he has been successful in farming, marriage and war. The novel's opening portrays the famous wrestling match, the drums beat and the flutes sang and the spectators held their breath'[3] ; in his essay The Story of a Man and his People' Ernest A Champion states that:

'The drums, wrestlers, and the people respond to one beat of a people. [Achebe] captures perfectly the cohesion and strength of a tribal community []. It is this cohesion, order and strength seen in the texture of Ibo society which Achebe examines in the first part of the novel [] not in an academic anthropological sense, but in the context of real life [].'[4]
At this point the reader is introduced to a community very much together, they all respond to one beat of a people', but it is this unity that begins to fall apart throughout the novel and ultimately concludes with the end of their culture.
The novel's title is taken from a W. B. Yeat's poem called the Second Coming'[5] , the ominous lines are:
'Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' (Lines 1-4)
The tribes centre cannot hold' because of anarchy', loosed' upon their world both by the arrival of the white men who are Christians and by the actions of Okonkwo. The novel's tragedy, therefore works on two levels, one relating to Okonkwo and his family, and the other to the tribe as a whole .The tribes people are unaware and unprepared for the arrival of outsiders, they know only the way of life of the tribe, customs and beliefs passed down from generation to generation. The first chapter shows us that the Ibo society is a self-contained society; we later learn that everything is gendered, it is the males that have the control, especially the elders who are respected for their age. The location of Umuofia is not described to the reader and we get the impression that the Ibo world extends little further than

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