Okonkwo A Tragic Hero English Literature Essay

Okonkwo is the antithesis to his father, for his father Unoka is a bum, who was in debt to everyone else in the clan, more or less. In the beginning of the book Chinua Achebe clearly states what Unoka is like, “In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.” (C. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Page 8). Okonkwo on the other hand is known for his activities as a wrestler and a warrior. At a party a man called him the greatest warrior and wrestler alive, a far cry from his father who abhorred fighting and blood and felt that through being lazy and music he could have a good life. Achebe clearly states how Okonkwo is in the following statements, “Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but had won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages.” (C. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Page 11).

Okonkwo is not a tragic hero merely due to his upbringing from very little and became such an important man in his society at such a tender young age. No, Okonkwo is mainly a tragic hero because of all of the adversity he faces after he kills Ikemefuna. For a character to be classified as a true tragic hero they must fall from a high place because of a fault of theirs. For Okonkwo this fault was his pride and violent nature in congruency with each other to yield an outcome where he was no longer looked upon by society with a favorable eye. Okonkwo’s story is one of loss and heartbreak, one of high hopes and tragedy, one of success and failure.

One of the most memorable tragic heroes of all time is a character known simply as Macbeth. Macbeth gains and loses everything over his greed and lust for more and more power in a world which is already complacent with its leaders. The congruencies between Okonkwo and Macbeth are staggering. In the beginning both are known as great men in their countries or clans, both are great warriors, and both have two titles given to them by a higher official or king. Both live a life of somewhat comfort and both have unique wives. Macbeth’s wife is the one who pushes him over the deep end to become king, whilst Okonkwo’s wife bears him a great child, and he wishes for her to come from a family of wealth, and so Okonkwo also strives for greater things due to a family member.

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Okonkwo is eventually, due an accident, banished into exile for seven years to his mother’s homeland. He plots his return to Umuofia every single day while he is there. These plans however do not go as planned and he eventually collapses on himself and his own ambitions. Although Okonkwo is a proud warrior and wrestler, his own pride stops him from accepting the white people and becoming a lord of his clan, an ambition he has held in his mind for quite some time and it runs his entire life. This situation clearly shows that an outside event has stopped him from achieving what he has strived for all his life so he kills himself, a shameful act in the eyes of the Umuofian people. In the following sentence Obierka, a friend of Okonkwo’s, voices his opinion of why Okonkwo died, “”That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog. . . .”” (C. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Page 191).

Okonkwo, a man of title and fame in his clan, dies because of an outside influence. This fact alone classifies him as a tragic character, yet there is much more of his story that exemplifies a true tragic hero. He starts out from very little and works his way up to a high position among his people, which ultimately set him up for his downfall and eventual suicide. Once at the top he commits an act that was warned against by a man who was much higher than him in rank, this constitutes his beginning into the downward spiral that would eventually claim his life. At the end of his spiral it seems he is being revived back to his old self when he kills the court messenger, but that turns out to be the nail in the coffin and sends him to his grave. He was in disgust at his fellow people that would not even react when the whites told them to cease and desist during a public meeting. All of this information constitutes the argument that Okonkwo is a tragic hero.

The main reason for Okonkwo to go off the deep end and take his own life in the complacency of the people he originates from and the amount of change they have allowed. The people of Umuofia heard stories of white men but never thought they were real, and when they came they laughed and gave them supposedly cursed ground. These gestures eventually lead to the downfall of their people as a whole and the colonization of their tribe and the ones around it. Eventually in the seven years Okonkwo was gone they became complacent with their life with the white people and even allowed them to build a school, a hospital, and even establish a form of government. These acts to Okonkwo were unacceptable and he was of course the first to act in his new war against the white people and their way of life. He resented how his own son had thrown in his lot with them and then they take over his village. When the men of Umuofia gathered for a meeting the court messengers came and tried to disperse them, this failed and Okonkwo killed the one who was leading the rest. But to his great despair the rest of his people did not follow his example and the other four court messengers got away.

The story of Okonkwo is sad in its tragedy and it sends us a serious message through the colonization of the tribes and the uprooting of their ways of life. Okonkwo tried very hard to bring happiness and a good work ethic to his family but in the end all he could bring was sadness and disillusionment at the act he commit. Okonkwo may have hit his wives and beat his children and alienated his eldest son by killing his best friend and, pretty much, adopted brother but he also brought a very conservative outlook to things. He played by all the rules his father did not, he struggled in life to get to where he ended up in the end, and for what, he died in the end because of a tyrannical society oppressing their way of life and their religion. Is there anything more tragic than reaching for the stars and getting shot down by someone else because of their selfish ambitions?

In conclusion Okonkwo is a tragic hero because he was a man of stature in his society and he fell from a high place because of his pride and violent nature. Okonkwo is not so different from many other tragic heroes from plays and books past, such as Macbeth. Both characters achieved much in their lives but a painfully obvious flaw in them caused them to fall to nothingness and die. Okonkwo committed suicide because he could not stand to see his village in the shambles he came back to see it in and because his own pride would not allow him to run away or allow himself to be taken by the white people to their base-of-operations to be hung. In jail Okonkwo received scars from the court messengers beating him, and not even his pride allowed him to retaliate more than killing one man. Okonkwo is truly a tragic hero and his story is one of sadness and of loss.