Analysis of Three Short Stories by Chinua Achebe, Literary Essay Sample

Chinua Achebe is a prolific English-language narrator. As a novelist, Achebe employs the influence of English prose to depict, fuse, and disclose diverse phases of Nigerian society. His subjects are equally legendary and opinionated. In broad terms, Achebes texts echo artistic assortment in the twentieth-century African civilization. He centres on the complexity experienced by Africans who were previously under the decree of British royalties but soon after had to struggle with matters of equality, the vices of martial rule, common war, ethnic rivalries, and autocracy. Achebe gets to conserve the maxims and facts of his Ibo ancestral custom by integrating them into his tales, whether they are in his existing narratives or his childrens accounts. His efforts do more, nevertheless than amuse. They expose realities about individual character and illustrate the obliteration of authority that is contaminated. Achebes inscription does not direct blame but conveys a point to his booklovers, regarding unison and the requirement for opinionated steadiness in Nigerian society.

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Chinua Achebes anecdote Marriage Is a Private Affair unwraps with a debate involving a young lady named Nene and a youthful man named Nnaemeka, who survive in Lagos, Nigeria (Achebe, 36). They adore each other and plan to get married. Nnaemeka ought to choose whether he will pursue his mores and wed his arranged mate or go his differing way. This is also an obscure verdict for Nnaemeka since he has resided in Ibo for so long that the Ibo customs are all he truly discerns and hence abandoning his ethnicity to wed his love could be rather tough for him. He is faced since if he goes his way, his people and his culture might never again accept him, and he will become all alone with no one to help him when he is in need of help with this extremely intricate difficulty. The problems that Nnaemeka bumps into are much related to the troubles that the Mother in "Love Must Not Be Forgotten" runs into (Achebe, 64).

This tale notifies us marriage ought to be a concealed affair. It also explains that we should not fasten towards our practice and traditions because if we could not modify our convention according to the occasion, we cannot get contentment. Here, Okeke could not adjust his traditional stance of Ibo traditions; he brought a nuisance to others, and he suffered the pain himself. Therefore, we ought to maintain impending limits, and we should learn to recognize the alteration. Eventually, Okeke also had to acknowledge the change. This tale presents the practice of Ibo mores of Nigeria. We cannot accept some issues easily. How could be a father so vulgar to his son? How could he disregard him? All parents care for their brood. Towards the end also, Okeke could have acknowledged them for his own need since he was going to be aged and he required the financial support.

This narrative reminded me the Nepalese fix marriage institution. In Nepal too, parents did not like to acknowledge the matrimony outside their kind and culture. Parents settle on the marriage of their son and daughter. On the other hand, loving marriage is not taken so optimistically. Parents appear to accept the opposite. In the loving marriage of their son and daughter, they tend to become irritated for several months or years.

Vigorous, youthful, and optimistic as he is, Obi expects to clean up the enlightening operation discipline and hurry up its Christianizing charge. By now, forthright in his condemnation of the tapered analysis and habits of superannuated individuals in the schooling field. He anticipates doing a good job of this grand opportunity and showing people how a school should be managed (Achebe, 33). His devices include instituting contemporary techniques and command high paradigms of schooling, while his wife, Nancy, who looks forward to being the trendy wife of the headmaster and fix her dream precincts of beautiful hibiscus and Allamanda hedges. With Nancy undertaking her farming element, they will jointly elevate Ndume School from its reluctant approaches to a position of European-motivated splendour in which school rules will substitute the Ndume hamlet communitys customary values.

Covered in satire, the essence of Dead Mens Path is articulated in the very last piece of the pastors reprimand to Obi: What I constantly say is allow the hawk alight and let the eagle perch (Achebe, 31). Although Obi is entirely conscious of the artistic code of respect to age and eminence, he perseveres in his overconfidence because of his recently attained supremacy. He disregards the ethnicity-specific policy of reality and the world of dualities that authorizes two very dissimilar articles to stand face to face. To the cleric of Ani, the causeway symbolizes permanence. It is the villages salvation: Our deceased relations leave it, and our antecedents visit us via it. But most essentially, it is the course of children approaching as new-born.

To Obi, though, it simply characterizes what he considers as the rearwardness that he has vowed to eliminate throughout his modern methods program. The priests row is straightforward: Two traditions can coexist, their disparities notwithstanding since there are no Supremes in the villages. Principally the protagonist, Michael Obi, and his wife, Nancy, communicate the key theme of continuity and change in this excellent tale. Note their thoughts about the reluctant school that they trust to strengthen by the vigour of their personalities. They acknowledge this occupation since they desire an occasion to convey this school and its village into the contemporary planet, as they witness it still being spellbound in primordial and irrational ways. This, of course, initiates us to the enormous quarrel between new European approaches that are inflicted upon resident native artistic customs.

The means in which an old lady encroaches on school land on her way back from an indigenous temple, even though she is just on foot on a hallowed boardwalk, brings this argument into the open. Michael Obi, as the personality demonstrating change and self-assured thinking, consequently trenches himself against the diverse powers of convention and permanence that are sorted next to him and will not clinch the latest modern ways he champions as easily as he believes they will. Therefore, we can see this premise is centred on through intrigue, personality and background in this text.

Girls at War is a legend about the hostilities among the seceding country of Biafra and Nigeria, and both the subject and the intrigue are prefigured in the auxiliary sentence introducing the main characters: The first instance their trails crossed nothing occurred. The second time they convene, on the other hand, is at a checkpoint at Akwa, when the lass, Gladys, impedes Nwankwos car to scrutinize it. He falls back on the decorum of his office and personality, but this fails to electrify her, which furtively delights and motivates him. He sees her as a gorgeous girl in a busty blue jumper, khaki jeans, and canvas shoes with the new-style hair knit which gave a young woman a bold look. Before, in the former junctures of the war, he had scorned at the militia girls, predominantly after seeing a faction conscripted from a high school striding under the placard We Are Impregnable. Now he starts to value them because of the grown-up attitude and behaviour of Gladys, who seems both nationalistic and confident, knowing and nonetheless naive.

This chronicle takes place in the period just following the Biafran War. It points out with the sarcastic heading that there may not be much distinction between communal war and civil harmony. Jonathan Iwegbu feels privileged that he, his wife, and three of their four kids have endured the war. As an added gratuity, so has his bicycle, which Jonathan had ingeniously buried in his backyard to keep it from the prowling troops. After the war, Jonathans capitalist instincts can thrive because he has the bicycle.

His business endeavours do well and, in addition, he obtains cash reimbursement of Nigerian money called the exgratia reward or egg-rasher by the Nigerians rebellious with the foreign expression for turning in radical money coined during the disagreement. Unfortunately, a gang of thieves, many of them previous soldiers, equipped with machine guns and other warheads learn of his windfall and intimidate Jonathan and his family in a way indicative of wartime, until Jonathan presents them the money. Fatalistically, yet pragmatically, Jonathan grasps he is back to square one, and, towards the end of the story, he and his family are once again preparing to go out and start off all over again. In Jonathans words, he says, let egg-rasher pass away in the flames! Let it go where the whole lot has gone.

Even the relaxed reader of Achebe's stories quickly becomes conscious of the give-and-take relationships the novelist wallops between his shorter and longer descriptions. Though his stories appear to stir away from the straight communal alarms of the lengthy narratives, this is not the case. In most of his stories, Achebe exploits the occurrences of individuals to investigate the problems of the well-built society. Ultimately, the stories amount to valuable texts that depict socio-political, cultural, and economic alterations of the community. In his undersized stories, Achebe has revealed how creative writing can deal with trying instants such as colonization and warfare and their effects. It also shows how art can materialize from moments of sheer chaos, and he has reacted with understanding to the affliction of others. The age bracket that witnessed both the colonization of Africa and the Nigerian-Biafran War without a doubt knew the pain that resulted from years of mayhem. War is the most apparent indication of individual life gone horrifically wrong, and this is the significance of Achebe's stories. Giving a common sense of what it implies for the common person to live through the conditions of war is the main donation of the little short stories Achebe has unruffled.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Dead Mans Path.Achebe, Chinua. Girls at War.Achebe, Chinua. Marriage is a Private affair.