Saturday, August 13, 2011

How did Nwoye change as a person in Things Fall Apart during the course of the novel (especially in regards to converting to Christianity)?

Nwoye initially tries to keep his interest in Christianity
secret from his father Okonkwo. The son has always find it difficult to fit in the
tribal traditions that mean so much to his father and his conversion is an act of
rebellion against his authority. Nwoye sees Christianity as less violent and patriarchal
than Igbo society and less obsessed by standards of masculinity. He finds himself more
at home in his adoptive religious faith than in the religious beliefs of his own
tradition. Yet, in the subsequent novel No Longer at Ease, the
character is shown as constantly caught in the dilemma of being a Christian but of
having to spend most of his existence within a community of people who still subscribe
to traditional beliefs. Nwoye, or Isaac as he chooses to be called after his convertion
to signify his unwillingness to sacrifice his identity to his father, considers them
heathens. His condition is similar to that described in the epigraph to the novel
No Longer at Ease, the last lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Journey of
the Magi":


We returned to our places, these
Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With
an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another
death.

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