Fear of the Father Things Fall Apart
Fear of the Father At the heart of Things Fall Apart lies the conflict between Okonkwo and his son, Nwoye, and as this conflict is created and fed by Okonkwo’s hate of his father and by the coming of European civilization, it becomes a metaphor for the overall conflict between the “civilized” whites and the “uncivilized” Africans, thus adding to Achebe’s meaning, which is that the world is an unfair and harsh place dominated by whoever is the strongest. Nwoye and his father got along without any signs of conflict while Nwoye was young, yet this yet signs of this disappearing show up due to Okonkwo’s fear of being a failure like his father. At first there is no conflict between Nwoye and his father because he is just a young child, and all he knows is that he must obey his father, so he does. ... Okonkwo despised his father, and because of his immense fear of failure, he made his son work on farming yams even though he knew that Nwoye and Ikemefuna were “still too young to understand fully the difficult art of preparing seed-yams” , he made them work anyway because he was scared that he saw something of his father’s spirit in Nwoye.