Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart: Commentary on Environmental Determinants on Character Traits

There is a theme of parental effect on child development in Achebe. The conflict is derived from Okonkwu's major character flaw-- his need to be the ideal masculine warrior. Okonkwu , even when it seems that through some coincidence is given the tools to show compassion, is always overcome by his brutish nature. But Achebe consistently is attributing this brusqueness and antipathy with Okonkwu's detestment of his father's un-masculinity and his need to be the opposite of his father and therefore the extreme form of masculinity. Okonkwwu "was possessed by the fear of his father's contemptible life and shameful death" (Achebe 18). The main struggle is that of Okonkwu not being able to overcome his fear of being like his father. This transfers to his own son: Okonkwu's hyper-manliness affects the nature of Nwoye, his oldest son. It i a cycle where the father is always influencing the son who is then influencing his own son in an infinite cycle.

Okonkwu lived not by the laws of the gods or by nature, but he "was ruled by one passion-- to hate everything his father Unoka had loved" (Achebe 13). Okonkwu's nature was not determined by his inherent character traits but by the traits he developed through social constructs and a life lived in embarrassment with his incompetent, idle, and indebted father.  But it is a bit of an irony because his father has good qualities such as gentleness and a love for playing the flute, but Okonkwu cannot see the good because he is blinded by the bad. Okonkwu has become the an output of his tribe that has all of the recommendable characteristics- hardworking, determined, strong, quick, and courageous  but he lacks the moral guidance ethical consideration that is also essential for being a member of the tribe. Okonkwu's anxiety over his father's idleness has him so focused on being manly that he turns into a brute because he forgets about compassion, gentility, and patience, traits that his father had, but Okonkwu was unable to recognize. For example, when Okonkwu beats his wife during the Peace Week because she was late making dinner. This was a direct ignorance of the laws of their gods who deemed it a peaceful week,but Okonkwu was too preoccupied with exerting his manliness. Or perhaps the most prominent example is when he tosses aside humility and paternal emotions and comes with the group who kills his adopted son Ikemefuna and not only is he present for the killing but he cannot be seen as weak so he must exert his manliness by putting his ax into Ikemefuna and thus killing his son, in this unnatural act of filicide.

Ikemefuna was a chance for Okonkwu to change his nature and show some compassion. He was very fond of Ikemefuna but he refused to show it because emotions are seen to him as a weakness, as something only for women. Ikemefuna was a way out of this love-less life and Okonkwu literally killed his compassion when he killed Ikemefuna. 

But his lack of compassion is not only affecting himself, but also his blood-related son, Nwoye. Nwoye loved and was becoming both a masculine and compassionate man with the companionship of Ikemefuna; his adopted brother was teaching him more than his father could. But with his father's weakness, not in physicality--the sense of the world that Okonkwu knows-- but in ethical weakness-- in an ability to stand up for what you love-- Nwoye loses not only his most reliable role model but also he loses faith in the ideals of his father. He can see no good in masculinity or toughness anymore because he see how it destroyed his best friend and brother. 

Okonkwu's father failed him in his inability to teach Okonkwu the importance of kindness and compassion, two things that his father actually knew something about. Okonkwu fails both of his sons through his inability to teach them kindness and compassion because he knew nothing about these traits. But Okonkwu's effort to teach Nwoye masculinity backfires. Okonkwu's mistakes have all of the opposite effects that he wanted and his son seems too much like Okonkwu's own father in his eyes, gentle and emotional. But although Okonkwu is upset at his son's lack of manliness, he has only himself to blame. Although he cannot see it, blinded by his hatred of his father and therefore hatred of all things gentle, his son is better off being compassionate. The alternation of generations of compassion is a intricacy of familial effects on nature.

Whitman, from "Songs of Myself": Boundaries of the Identity

Whitman's epic poem is rife with contradictions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes. It is a constant struggle between which part of identity is inherent and which part comes from the outside influences. Which perspectives are your own and which are imposed on you from this world outside of your own thought?

In part 4 of "Songs of Myself", he lists rapidly events that are considered to have an impact on a person:"discoveries, inventions, societies" or "the sickness of one of my folk" and he determines that these events are detached from him, "they are not the Me myself." He brings up all of the life events, small and large that seemingly impact one's person and yet he is separate from him. "These come to [him] day and night and go from [him] again." They are too fleeting for him to harness to be apart of him; he cannot integrate these events into himself. He is impartial. There is a sense of this "in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it"but there is no integration of his thought and his self with the impact of scientific discoveries, unrequited love, and horrific battles (of the Civil War).The world enters him and he enters the world but there is no mutual interaction, he is complacent.  He is submerged, yet separate, like a biological entity with a highly selective cell wall that processes all of the information that comes to it but turns most alien subject out. It is almost an inhuman, mechanical way of living. There is no emotion to this described-self that has "no mocking or arguments, witness[ing] and wait[ing]." It leaves one wanting emotion, a response, something human to grasp onto.

In part 16 of "Songs of Myself", there is more of an acceptance of influence of the material  world on identity. There is a focus especially on the identity as an American, and as he lived through the Civil War, there is a start on the association of being both a Southerner and a Northerner. He is at home as a "Yankee," as a "Kentuckian," Louisianian," or "Georgian", as a "Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye", or in Vermont, Maine, Texas, or California. He hits every region of the U.S. He is at home everywhere and yet I feel as if he is at home no-where. He belongs everywhere and is everything and yet he lacks an identity. There is no way to pin his sense-of-self down and so he just floats away in this immense diversity. He also is of every profession and categorization of a person, "a farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor,  quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest." It is an impossibility as we think it to be all of these things at once and this paradox is to illuminate the problems of categorization. A human cannot be labeled and stereotyped. Labels and imposed-identities are over-whelming, leading to a crisis, as he demonstrates, where a sense of self is lost amongst the lists of labels.  But at the end is where there is a sense of positivity comes in when he accepts the diversity, but without labels, this idea that "everything is in its place," including himself. There is a sense of acceptance with the unknown, a comfort. "The bright suns [he] see[s] and the dark sun[s] [he] cannot see are in their place" and also "the palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place." The things he knows and the things he cannot know, that are out of his range are all where they belong, even the contradictions in self and the inconsistencies are accepted, but not in a Candide-esque way, he is more explorative than Candide, who accepts things as they are given to him. As he made clear in section 4, Whitman does not accept all things through his cell walls, he is a very selective creature, he came to this notion of things being in their place through his own exploration.

William Blake,The Little Black Boy-- A Note in Black and White

The narrator of this poem, "a little black boy", knows clearly the different connotations between the society's view on black skin color and white skin color but he also has an insight into the transcendent equality of humanity. The little black boy differentiates the distinctness between black and white. His skin is black, "as if bereaved of light" and his soul is white "as an angel is the English child." It is a paradox in his acceptance of white being the color of light and superiority but also is non-acceptance to his skin color being his only defining trait. As he says, "my soul is white" and therefore as a person, as a soul, he is not lacking light and he is therefore innocent, only on the outer facade is he dark. He accepts that his facade may appear dark because it is what allows his inside to be pure white.

It is a bit of a paradox because this darkness is what allows his inside to be light. "And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud" that will shade him from the directness of God's heat and allow him to absorb this other-worldly knowledge better than the English man with his white and un-shaded skin. It is as if the black man has this gift that on Earth-- his skin color-- that allows him to be less ignorant than the white man because he has a better understanding of this transcendental world, the knowledge coming in from God in this extreme light form. The white man is too ignorant to capture much of this extreme light from God; the white man is ignorant not only to the transcendental knowledge but also to the black man's worth. It is paradoxical again in the sense that Blake acknowledges the inherent "goodness" in the color white and yet he still does not ascribe any overwhelmingly good qualities to the white man other than his coloring.

But in the Christian ascent to heaven, "the cloud will vanish" and there will be no differentiation between skin colors and the lack of light in the black boy's skin will be cleared like rays of sunshine coming through a cloud. This is where Blake's egalitarian ideas become more apparent because when a the black boy realizes that in God's transcendental world, "when i from the black and he from the white cloud free," they both become on equal and realizable terms. In the material world they are unable to truly realize their equality because it is a knowledge only of the intangible world. Blake is making a commentary that humans are equal in the heavenly world and also in the material world, but it is impossible for the white man to realize this equality in the material world because they do not have the dark skin to absorb pieces of this knowledge from the transcendental world, only the black man has this help.  Humans can only truly realize their equality after they have transcended to the immaterial world and have been stripped of these "clouds of color."

The last stanza of this poem has what seems like and what has been critiqued as racism in the "and be like him and he will then love me." The "him" and the "he" are not quite clear if Blake is referring to God or to white man but I believe that the "him" and "he" refer to the white man because in Christianity and in this poem God is portrayed as loving all and "giv[ing] his light and giv[ing] his heat away" to all creatures of the earth, so it would seem contradictory to have the black man have to earn God's love. It seems more plausible that it is a commentary by Blake on the white man's lack of love for the black man  in the material world but his realization in the immaterial world, with the help of the "shade from the heat" from the black man, that all humans are equal. the black man helps the white man learn and the white man loves him not only for his help but also for the lesson that the black man helped him realize that all humans are equal in God's world. It isn't so much a racist comment, as some people have critiqued Blake but more a criticism of the white man's inability to love the black man in the material world.

Reflections on Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France-- The Reversion of Order

According to our friend Burke, the French Revolution aggressively tore apart all that was orderly in the humane society of France. In post-revolution France there was no chivalry and no respect for what differentiated human society from bestial society. In other words "all these pleasing illusions" i.e. chivalry and the ostentatious grandeur of politeness in the ranks of the upper class "harmonized the different shades of life" i.e. this chivalry made up for the majority of the population in lower class who were destitute of all of the luxuries of chivalry (Burke 45).  But no worries, the animal-like conditions of the public were not a problem because the grandness of the royalty was enough to throw a blanket over the ugliness that was the living conditions of the lower class. He saw society in the terms only of the upper class, he gave credence to the gentlemanly status, which in itself is not a problem, the problem with his ideas are that they disregard those that are not of the gentlemanly status.

Burke was a royalist and had a viewpoint that is not seen as acceptable today. This idea that all humans, no matter their economic position, their skin color, their gender, are equal. This was also one of the main ideas of the enlightenment: equality (along with liberty and equality). Burke sees this idea of equality as intangible, as an idea from the "men of theory". In Burke's opinion society cannot be based on these intangible ideas, such as equality. The post-revolution France will fall apart sooner or later because there is a void in the cohesiveness. There is no structural support to society without rank, nobility, and "entailed inheritance" ( this idea that monarch power is derived from the previous, through inheritance and God's will: and intertwining of church and state). (Burke 39).  (There is no longer a love for royalty or a consideration for anyone but one's self. I almost can empathize with what he is saying here because if there is an extreme individualization there is no sense of human kindred-ness anymore, but Burke has exaggerated this idea of individualization. It is  impossible to completely extract compassion from human life, it is in our nature and even if you do not believe that is in human capacity to have at least some care for another human being than it is in human's best interest to be a social creature. Anyway this idea that Burke brings of an inconsideration for others is greatly out of proportion, especially considering his general lack of consideration for the lower class.

If his highly unrelatable ideas weren't very present by the end of this excerpt, in one of the first paragraphs he already let a hint in about his obsolete ideas. He refers to Marie Antoinette "as all that is delicate and feminine, semi-divine and yet vulnerable, Woman as seen in the chivalric tradition calling upon men for protection." (Burke 34). Right away all sorts of bells were going off in my head, "delicate!?", "for protection!?"but I had forgotten the time period. This idea is more cohesive with the whole population,even the lower class. The irony in this is that the "equality" of the enlightenment movement did not account for women. Th equality extended to a specific group of people, to the male working lower-middle class. In this sense, the enlightenment maintained this order between males and females that Burke approves of.  Men are there to protect women from physical work and the ugliness of the world; it is a male's chivalrous duty to protect the innocent eyes of the woman. That is what the grandeur that royalties put on in the Palace of Versaille and the likes with all of its shining and luxury to protect woman like Marie Antoinette, but Burke looks over all of the woman in the lower class who are immersed in the this ugliness all of the time. So not only are they overlooked by the ruling class and then they are still overlooked by the revolters. But that is not something that many people, including Burke, of that time were concerned with. It is a modern idea to have concern for gender equality. But it goes along with this idea that Burke's writing was difficult to relate to because his ideas are so obsolete.

Candide and Pope's Essay on Man -- Reactions to Social Changes

For every social change there is a reaction, either for, against, or somewhere in the middle. Responses to the humanist liberation of individuals and ideas, especially in the middle class, were positive. The image of the middle class as a collective unit was shattered by the introduction of inquiry and reason. It was an emulsification, not only of each person, but also of the presupposed knowledge.  Everything that had been taken for granted, as universal truths had been turned on its head. This was seen by some as an exciting new opportunity, a liberation from the chains of the old authority of monopolized knowledge. But not all responses had quite as positive an outlook. This changing of solidified truth was chaos. It was disturbing the order of the cosmos and the world and  the society. As the Pope says in his Essay on Man it was the questioning of the power  of God, of a power beyond human capacity.

The Essay on Man approaches a problem brought about by the Enlightenment: this idea that there is a need to inquire into pre-established notions and question the pre-established order of the world. The pope is outraged by the use of reason because it is a disrespect to God's plan. This enlightenment movement involves a distrust in God where human's find the need to question God's plan and try to uncover some sort of knowledge beyond what we as humans can handle. The Pope advises that we keep to our duties as humans, a status not equivalent to God, and don't meddle in the "perfection" of the God's will. It is unnecessary to inquire too much because whatever happens is what God wanted to happen. It is beyond us to understand why. It was almost a bit modern in a "what happens, happens" sort of way. In the right context it could've been seen as soothing or calming in that in life, sometimes it goes happily and sometimes it goes sour but we just have to know it is going to be okay in the grand scheme of things. But on the other hand, it can be seen as passive; we want something more, a control over our destiny, a knowledge that everything we do isn't futile and that we aren't just small pieces in a picture beyond our perspective. Voltaire falls in this latter category. He is not keen on this idea that everything that happen is just dandy.  

And , in this chain of reactions to social changes,Voltaire had a satirical response to the Pope and God's perfect plan. It was a bit of a straw-man argument in that he satirizes a  mis-characterization of the Pope's meaning. He satirizes the idea that all things that happen in the world are inherently good because they are God's will. He exaggerates this by all sorts of horrible things happen to Candide and the people he meets in his adventure but the seriousness of these events is never recognized by any of the character. Voltaire is poking at the idea that not all things are good and  the Pope cannot just wipe a broad stroke over everything and call all things good under God's will. Both of the main women characters, Cunegonde and the old woman suffer through rape, or sexual  assault, or abuse of one sort or another and no one is ever appalled or even really phased. These are clearly not good things and it is not alright to gloss over them with the passing words "it is all good and in God's plan". But this is where Voltaire was satirizes a mis-characterized argument. The pope is not saying every action and event is good, but of course, some actions are bad or unpleasant or even horrible, but in the grander picture, in God's picture, there is only perfection.

But Voltaire comes back to his main frustration with there is no drive for an individual if they do not have some sort of control over their own life. He ends with the cultivation of the garden. All of the characters end in a contented life. They have chosen their path and our literally cultivating their own life: their well-being and happiness. But their perspectives are narrow and they are contented only on the small scale of their garden home. Candide and friends are in control but only because they have shrunk their sphere of being. It is ironic in that Voltaire almost agrees with the Pope in that Candide and his friends settle down in a quiet, mildly fulfilling life where they do not push boundaries or perspectives.  The Pope in Essay on Man encourage humans to perform their humanly duties, stay in their realm of being, and do not reason or inquire because those actions are in the territory of God. And then Voltaire ends with the main characters staying in their human spheres without a real purpose or drive behind their actions. Candide and his friends have become the epitome of the human ideal according the Essay on Man; they do not challenge perspective and they do not wish for more than what they have.