MODERN NOVEL

Q1: Character of Okonkwo?

ANS: Character Of Okonkwo:

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages. He was tall and stout. His
fame rested on his personal achievements. He was a hard worker and wealthy
farmer. He had three wives. He had taken two titles and was hopful to take the
third. He brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze, in a wrestling
match. He was not like his father, who was a lazy person and cannot see the sight
of blood. He was brave, hardworking and courageous.

He was a man of action. He used his fist more than the words. He was a great
wrestler, and he was first to bring home a human head. On great occasions he
drank wine from his first human head.

When the white men came to Umofia and the people of Umofia were unwilling to
fight against them. Okonkwo said:

“we must fight these man and drive them from the land.”

He again said.

“what is it that happen to our people? Why have they lost the power to fight.”

At the end when he saw that all the clansman are not ready to fight, he said to
Oberieka.

“I shell fight alone if I chose”.

He was trustworthy and respected. When a girl of Umuofia was rulled by a person
of another village, Mbamo, Okonkwo went to that village as the representative of
Umuofia .

“Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbamo as the proud and imperious emissary of

war, he was treated with great honour and respect”.
He was also one of the elders who went to meet the commissioner. When the
elder were kept by pay fine. The people of Umuofia collected and paid fine
because they were the respected and trustworthy people of their village and
okonkwo was one of them.

He was treated his family with an iron hand . His three wives and children feard
him. He worked hard in order to get honour and respect in the society. He was a
wealthy farmer of the umoufia. He worked from morning till the evening in the
fields.

At the funeral ceremony of Ezeudu, Okonkwo unknowingly killed the son of

Ezeudu. In the punishment he was banished from his village and his house was set
on fire. He spent his 7 years of exile in his mother clan. When Okonkwo went back
to home he saw that every thing will be change . Okonkwo wants to change the
white men civilized .But he was filed. When the white man sent to their
messenger. Okonkwo killed the messenger, after killed the messenger Okonkwo
commited suicide.

Q2: Theme of imperialism in Things Fall Apart?

ANS: Theme Of Things Fall Apart:

There could be a number of thenies in a single novel. In this regard Things Fall
Apart is no exception.

The influence of western civilization over the Ibo civilization is one of the
dominant theme in the novel. Main theme is that of clash of culture of civilization.
The clash here is between Ibo culture a-western culture. There is also a book
“clash of civilization” by huntingtion.

The main theme shows the onslaught of values on African one. Main theme
shows struggle between traditions of change. There is a conflict tradition has its
own short comings while change has it own draw books. Chinua Achebe is an
African writer, so it is his utmost attempts to give account of things from African
prespective.
Before Appearance of “Things Fall Apart” people were familiar only with
colonizer. He looked at things not with the eye of a colonized. Since the writer is
African by cast, so he better knows the influence of colonialism and so he did his
best to give the account of change that took place of nobody else could know
better than Achebe himself.

Masculanity is one of themes of it has been interpreted in various ways. Some

times it liked with yam of sometime with other things. Because it is considered in
Ibo society that the more yam seeds you would grow, the masculinity you would
have of vice versa etc. Towards the end of part ii, there are signs of change, the
protagonist resist the change. There may be personal reasons behind this
resistance but one thing is elear that the love of land of Ibo society is at root of
this resistance. People are divided in Umuofia, some rejected while other
embrare the new social values of religious values.

Okonkwo at once rejects the change but people are wonder struoked what to do
and what not to do.

Defendance of Ibo system on, story telling and language has been ddiberately
emphasized. In this way Achebe make us realize that how quickly the
aboldonment of Ibo. Language for English could lead tradition which are at the
root of their culture because language is of their culture identify.

Religiously both the cultures are also different because previous to part ii, we are
introduced to polytheistic society, culture, they have separate gods for each and
every purpose. Some of them contrd rain, harvest and other thing etc. While on
the other hand monotheistie society is shown. Earlier in the moved we come
across ritualistie religious. For instance representative of Agbala, consultation to
oracle, offering made to different gods etc.

There is no such thing as state, culture, good changes should be accepted.

Okonkwo is not ready to modify himself and is also not ready to accept changes in
culture which is destructive and in the result hangs himself. We came to know
that their should be flexibility in a culture.
Q3: Features of modernism in Things Fall Apart?

ANS: Features of modernism in Things Fall Apart:

1. Chinua Achebe, Modernist:

Achebes novel from inclusion alongnisde more establishedworks of
modernist fiction currently offered in the third year component devoted to
modernism in the English Department.
Things Fall Apart thus threatened to render strange a more familiar perhaps
even settled mini modernist canon. That this eventuality was probably itself
a typically modern undertaking was not lost on me.
2. Readings:
Things Fall Apart is set in a precolonial Igbo village, Umofia. Since then I
have taken greater pleasure in Achebe with words both English and Ibo
with the ease with which he handles and blends two seemingly
incompatible linguistic and culture currencies.
As I read Things Fall Apart again in preparation for this year’s lectures I find
myself drawn to the figure of Ezinma, the daughter of Okonkwo and Ekwefi.
3. Pedantry I ;Missing Dates:
In the novel’s final pages Achebe turns his attention to the mind of a
District Commissioner who muses about writing a book that will be called
The Pcification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger;
As imagined ethnography housed within the fictional paramaster of
Achebe’s novel The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger
has peculiar literary currency.
4. Pedantry II: ,Modernism’:
Clement Greeberg, Rita Felski, and Jose Ortega y Gasset have all regarded
modernism as an self-critical,self-conscious aesthetic style ; the new art its
an artist art’ as Ortega y Gasset suggests in The Dehumanisation of Art.
5. Baudelaire and the Black Venus:
I recall other, less personally chastening examples of European
modernism’s involvement with far flung margins of European empire. I
recall Ezra Pound’s Exile’s Letter a translation from the Chinese poetry of Li
po; Ernest Fenollosa’s preoccution with Chinese ideograms; Yeats’ reface
to the English translation.

Q4: Romantic approach of D.H.Lawrence?

ANS: Romantic Approach of D.H.Lawrence:
Lawrence’s poems are blunt, exasperating, imposing upon us his strangely
hectic, strangely delicate music, in fragments, in tantalizing broken-off parts
of a whole too vast to envisioned-and then withdrawing again. They are
meantto be spontaneous works, spontaneously experienced; they are not
meant to give us the sense of grandeur or permanence that others poems
attempt, the fallacious sense of immortality that is an extension of the
poet’s ego.
Yet they achive a kind of immortality precisely in this: that they transcend
the temporal, the intellectual. They are ways of experiencing the ineffable
‘’still point’’ that Eliot could approach only through abstract language.
Because of its melding of natural piety with sextual energy, the oeuvre of
D.H Lawrence might be summed up as Wordsworth Eroticized. Admittedly,
such a handily compact label would amount to a drastic oversimplification.
To begin with, it elides the erotic elements which, however deflected or
submerged, can be found in Wordsworth’s poetry. More crucially, it
overlookes the robust anti-Romantic strand in Lawrence’s sensibility. Still,
the sufficiently problematic, to warrant more searching study than they
have received. While Lawrence is unmistakably a modern and a
revolutionary, he is also an heir of the Romantic tradition that Wordsworth
helped to found.
Lawrence love the true marriagesof haven and hell, illusory opposites;he
loves to exalt the apparently unbeautiful. He sees these fruits as “autumnal
excermenta’’ and they please him very much. Erlier poems called “Carving
for Spring’’ he declared that he is sick for flowers of earliest spring- the
snowdrops, the jonquils, the “chill Lent lilies’’ because of their ‘’ faint-
bloodness, ice-fleshed’’ purity.He would like to trample them underfoot.
Q5: Oedipal complex in Sons and Lovers?
Odepius Complex in Sons And Lovers:
The term Oedipus has been drived from the name of the living Oepidus of
Thebes who, thought in ignorance, married his mother and had children by
her. Freud used this term to explain the manifestation of infanutile
sexuality in the relation of the child, to his parents. The Oedipus complex is
a state in which person shows excessive affection for the parents opposite
in sex to him or her and a corresponding distaste for his or her other
parents.
It is now a well recognized fact that D.H. Lawrance himself was the victim of
a deep-rooted oedpius complex. His mother Lydia Lawrance had a very
strong hold on him, and he too treated his mother like a lover. It was she
who gave him life-warmth. His orientation into life and literature also
depended on the inspiration she gave him.
In 1910, when Mrs. Lawrance was virtually on death- bed, Lawrance
wroteto his publication of “The White Peacock” . So that his mother could
see it, while she kept the live consciousness.They loved each other like
young lovers is repeatedly expressed in his early poems also. In Monologue
of Mother, the mother talk to her strange son “ Whom I have waited like a
lover”. And in, “The Virgin Mother” that seems to be presenting the
situationatthe death of Mrs.Lawrance, Lawrance say.
Spare me the strength to leave you now are dead.
I must go, but my soul lies helpless
Besides your bed.
In fact, throughout the second half of the novel, Paul relation with his
mother is that of a husband substitute. He sticks to her as if he were her
man. On their visit to Nottigham, he chatted away with his mother and she
was gay like a sweetheart’
“Later they walked down to station street, feeling the excitement of lovers
having an adventure together, they arrived home in the mellow evening,
happy, glowing, and tired.”
During to visit to Mrs.Leiver Farm, they went out into the wood that was
flooded with bluebells the bluebells the mother and the son were in ecstasy
together. The flowers which Paul sticks in her coat offer another concerete
symbol of this love.
The case of Paul differs from that of either Oedipus or Hamlet. The sin of
Oedipus was sin of ignorance and till the discovery was made his relation
with mother did not carry any suggestions of self-reproach.
Sons and Lovers has been described as the first Freudian novel in English. It
does presents the Freudian. Oedipus complex but the concept of its story
was not altered by Freud’s theories. Lawrance had already completed the
first draft of his novel before he became acquainted with the idea of Freud.
In the words of Graham Hough “Sons And Lovers” is indeed the first
fruedian novel in English.