Tragic+Hero

OKONKWO: A tragic hero?

Consider both of the following statements about Okonkwo as “tragic hero.” Consider what contributes most to the final tragedy of Okonkwo. Could his fall have been averted? Do you agree with King’s or McDowell’s assessments? Explain why or why not.

Okonkwo is destroyed, and brings ruin on others, because he is excessive in his adherence to the values of his society; those who can compromise, change with the times and adjust, are seen as more sensible. This does not make Okonkwo any less tragic or heroic. Despite Achebe's objective manner of narration, [Okonkwo is] portrayed with the sympathy and achieve noble stature in the course of the novel; the principles [he upholds] are also seen as noble and engage our sympathies. But such principles are often flawed and inherently unsound in the face of social change. Achebe is like [earlier writers] in presenting a tragic universe in which exceptional individuals are crushed by larger social forces. One is tempted to describe it as a deterministic universe, since the causes of the tragedy are inherent within the culture itself and its relationship to larger realities.

Bruce King

What Okonkwo cannot accept, finally, is the coming of the white man to the land ... Okonkwo cannot understand how his countrymen could be destroyed rather than defend themselves ... Finally, in despair, Okonkwo proceeds ... to commit the most horrendous of all offenses against the earth goddesssuicide. Thus he ends in disgrace with the community whose preservation obsessed him. His tribesmen cannot even touch or bury him; they can only attempt to cleanse the desecrated ground where he hanged himself. Why does the man [i.e., Okonkwo], his life and his death, move us so? It is, I think, because Okonkwo, perhaps the best among his fellows, sees the imminent danger to that old order which is there life, and more stubbornly than anyone else refuses to give up the old forms for the new formlessness. Such determination as Okonkwo's is heroic. Call it obsession; but it is nonetheless ... the mysteriously stiffing course of a man brave enough to reach beyond his fears to bold action.

Robert McDowell