Cultural Values and Disagreements in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Every culture or community is the culmination of all of its members. An individual’s view points, ideas, and religion are reflected in society. Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” is a striking illustration of how a society’s great and terrible aspects can coexist and how a conflict between them can cause a civilisation to fall apart. Igbo society has been depicted by Achebe in a very realistic way. Through a compelling portrayal of the beauty, strength, and legitimacy of traditional life and values as well as the disruptiveness of change, Achebe expands on the issue of traditional versus change. The arrival of the missionaries causes a shift in this book, as their meddling in Umuofia’s primitive civilisation causes the good and the wicked, the black and the white, to clash. The Ibo, an ethnic group that lives in South-East Nigeria, have a culture that is described in this paper along with the difficulties and conflicts they encounter when Europeans try to colonise their way of life. This paper aims to analyse the cultural conflicts encountered by the tribes. The study aims to analyse by applying cultural literary theory.