Things Fall Apart

Okonkwo is a very stern father who shows affection through pride. He believes that being hard on his children will force them to grow up hard.

The cast of Things Fall Apart - 2007 includes: Jordan Chiu as Boy

Ikemefuna called Okonkwo father. It would be unnatural for a father to kill his son. The boy was also affectionate towards Okonkwo, and it would be like a betrayal.

The court refused to listen to their story and tricked them, sentencing them without hearing their side. The soldiers handcuffed them in a trap, before they had time to put up resistance. They had their heads shaved. Further, they were imprisoned for days without food and water. During their imprisonment they were deeply whipped and beaten by the prison guards, whom constantly insulted the tribesmen.

In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is a man of great status and he is hardworking, yet his anger is the major part which starts to crack at his downfall. He is constantly getting angry at things like no warm meal when he gets home, and because his son wasn't as hard working as him. Okonkwo starts the downfall when he beats his wife during the Week of Peace which is considered a crime. When an elder dies the clan shoots guns and Okonkwo was there shooting his gun and it shot a little child and it is considered a womens crime to accidentally kill someone, if he shot the child on purpose it would be forgotten. Okonkwo has been exiled for 7 yearsand his property is burned down. When the whit missionaries invade his tribe Okonkwo goes billistic killing a messenger.Okonkwo's anger causes him to lose his control and when he does everyone around him feels powerless. He is exiled out of his home village and doesn't achieve the same status as before. When his fellow villagers wont help him revolt against the missionaries, he cracks under all the pressure and falls. Okonkwo's flaws cause his downfall by each little flaw effecting him to crack under the constant pressure and finally hang himself.

The church had also arrived in Umuofia. The white men had brought the government, the courts, and the prisons. Some of the Igbo had joined the church, and others were sending their children to the European style schools. The community had been split apart.

Motherhood is an important part to a woman in Igbo society. Ekwefi's nine other children had died

His church is burned down. He complains to the authorities, and then no more is heard from him in the book.

Okonkwo has many children:

Nwoye: son of his first wife.

Obiageli: daughter of his first wife.

Ikemefuna: adopted son.

Ezinma: daughter of Ekwefi

Nkechi: daughter of Ojiugo

Nneka: first child born to Okonkwo in Mbanta. "Mother is Supreme."

Nwofia: son born 2 years after Nneka. "Begotten in the Wilderness."

Onwumbiko: "Death, I Implore you." Third children borne to Ekwefi who dies in his fifteenth month.

Ozoemena: "May it not happen again." 4th child of Ekwefi, born after Onwumbiko. Dies in her eleventh month.

Onwuma: "Death may please himself." 5th child of Ekwefi.

Other:

- At least 6 other children are born to Ekwefi who die shortly after birth.

- At least 4 other living sons besides Nwofia

- Others not named.

Note: Obiageli may actually be Ojiugo's daughter, but used by the first wife to deliver meals. Another possibility is that both Ojiugo and the first wife have daughters named Obiageli, or that the first wife's name is also Ojiugo. This could also be a continuity error by Achebe.

Unoka found out that no ancestor or god was angry at him, but his crops were failing because he was too lazy to clear new fields, and was instead seeding his crops on worn out soil.

Yes, he is a tragic hero, because like many other tragic heroes he has a flaw and because of that flaw or weakness he suffered tragedies and then a tragic death. His main flaw stems from the fear of being like his father: a lazy, social, drunkard debtor. He cannot display his emotions because he doesn't want to look weak or effeminate, and when he does show any emotion, it is an uncontrollable rage.

Okonkwo has a minor breakdown and does not eat for two days, only drinking wine. He struggles with his personal beliefs, and is ashamed that he is emotionally affected.

He ends up becoming closer with his daughter Ezinma, who understands him best, though he continues to wish she had been born a boy.

Various moral dilemmas present themselves in Things Fall Apart, mostly around whether one should do something just because it is tradition.

The biggest example of this is when Ikemefuna is sentenced to die. Instead of stopping it from happening, Okonkwo ends up being the one who kills Ikemefuna.

Another example is the killing of twins when they are born.

This is the first mention of the white men and the coming change that they will all have to face. It is a foreshadowing of things to come, including Okonkwo's fate. It also forces the other villages to not immediately attack the white men on sight since the white men appear to have superior armament.

There are multiple incidents. If speaking of either the execution of Ikemefuna or the trip that Ezinma took with Chielo:

It shows that the people of Umuofia respect and think highly of their gods and oracles because anywhere else a mother and father would have probably fought for their child.

Ezinma is aware that Okonkwo loves her mother. She clearly looks up to her father, and is willing to take his advice, while at the same time being aware of his fierce temper and overall manliness. There are times when she can stand no one else but him.

The iron horse is a bicycle!!:)

The Ibo culture is something that the citizens of the nine villages are expected to abide by. There are rules and recreational hobbies that are mostly followed and done by men, but in this culture there isn't gender equality. Many men will have more than one wife and at least one title, unless he is a disgrace to hardworking, strong, masculine men. But many of the women are sold by their families to a husband and beaten and abused by him. Relationships are held together with respect, generosity, and trust. Whether its father to son, daughter to mother, husband to wife, there is equality at a point unexplained.

The fall of Ikemefuna marks the true beginning of Okonkwo's downfall. Before this, Okonkwo's situation was quite good and looking upwards; before this event is about the peak of Okonkwo's life.

no not really. for example if a grape and orange fall, they land at the same time. but if a feather and a orange fall well obviously the orange will fall first.

It's maybe the most famous scientific experiment, Galileo Galilei's dropping objects from the leaning tower of Pisa in order to prove that all objects fall at the same rate, whatever their mass.In his Two New Sciences (1634) Galileo discusses the mathematics (first to apply mathematics for physics analysis) of a simple type of motion what we call today uniform acceleration or constant acceleration. Then he proposes that heavy bodies actually fall in just that way and that if it was possible to create a vacuum, any two falling bodies would travel the same distance in the same time. On the basis of this proposal, he predicts about balls rolling down an inclined plane, Finally, he describes some inclined plane experiments corroborating his theory.Galileo used inclined planes for his experiment to slow the acceleration enough so that the elapsed time could be measured. The ball was allowed to roll a known distance down the ramp, and the time taken for the ball to move the known distance was measured. The time was measured using a water clock.Galileo showed that the motion on an inclined plane had constant acceleration, dependent only on the angle of the plane and not the mass of the rolling body. Galileo then argued that free-fall motion behaved in an analogous fashion because it was possible to describe a free-fall motion as an inclined plane motion with an angle of 90°. Using Newton's laws, we can prove Galileo's theory by decomposing the gravitational force, acting on the rolling balls, into two vectors, one perpendicular to the inclined plane and one parallel to it. http://www.physics.smu.edu/~ryszard/1313fa98/1313-Incline_.PDFFollowing his experiments, Galileo formulated the equation for a falling body or an object moving in uniform acceleration: d=1/2gt2.The is some evidence shows that such experiments were performed by various scientists and experimenters preceding Galileo's work about falling bodies and by this disproving Aristotle's assertion that heavier bodies fall faster than light ones.As early as 1544, the historian Benedetto Varchi referred to actual tests which refuted Aristotle's assertion.In 1576, Giuseppe Moletti, Galileo's predecessor in the chair of mathematics at the university of Padua, reported that bodies of the same material but different weight, as well as bodies of the same volume but different material, dropped from a height arrived at the Earth at the same time.In 1597 Jacopo Mazzoni, of the University of Pisa, reported that he had observed objects falling at the same speed regardless of weight and pieces of an object descending at the same rate as the whole.The most notorious of those is Simon Stevin that in 1586 (3 years before Galileo) reported that different weights fell a given distance in the same time. His experiments, with the help of his friend Jan Cornetts de Groot, were conducted using two lead balls, one being ten times the weight of the other, which he dropped thirty feet from the church tower in Delft. from the sound of the impacts they concluded that the spheres fell with the same speed, not as stated by Aristotle. Stevin is regarded by many as the first one to perform falling bodies experiments.Experiments to demonstrate the phenomenon.1. Hold on the tip of the fingers of different hands a coin and a paper disc about one meter or more above the floor. Drop both of them simultaneously. The coin will reach the floor before the paper disc. From this experiment is possible to conclude mistakenly that heavier objects fall faster.2. Mount the paper disc on the coin and drop them together. Both objects will reach the ground at the same time. The meaning of this experiment is that not the amount of mass causes falling bodies to fall faster or slower but the resistance/friction of air because air resistance is applied here only to the coin and not to the paper disc and by that we can infer that air resistance and not the amount of mass prevented the paper disc from falling faster - the same as the coin.To exclude the possibility that the coin and the disc of paper attract each other you can show that they do not stick together in any position.Experiments are from:Weiss Moshe, Physics by Experimental Demonstrations, vol II, Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1968, pp. 208-209

The gods and spirits were said to be supernatural. So too were the gods of the white man.

Obierika

Heart of Darkness explored the exploitation of Africa from a pure European perspective. It doesn't describe the culture of the africans nor giving them any human qualities. They are seen as part of nature and therefore disregarded. Achebe challenged this European view of depicting a lack of culture by writing Things Fall Apart full with folktales, Igbo sayings and giving the Africans a face while still staying impartial towards the Europeans. In doing so he responded to Heart of Darkness by completely tearing apart the description that Joseph Conrad had given of Africa.

Yams were seen as the main farming crop and meal staple of people in Things Fall Apart. Yams took a lot of effort to farm, but was the main way of sustaining a good life. Yams were celebrated, as was the Goddess of the Earth.