From one era to another....

The ultimate goal of an epigraph is to foster links between the piece of work about to read and another literary work in order to suggest the theme of the book. In ''Things Fall Apart'', Chinua Achebe quotes the following path of the well-known poem '' The Second Coming'' by William Butler Yeats.

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

– W.B Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Writers are the outcome of all the historical periods in which they have lived. The context shapes the writer's vision of the world. Chinua Achebe draws a parallel between his novel and Yeats’ poem. These two pieces of writing are strikingly similar since the context of production in which the book and the poem were written bears resemblances to each other. In the case of ''The Second Coming'', the context of production is the aftermath of World War I, a period of time in which beliefs, worldviews, politics and so on were broken  and the vision of the world was chaotic whereas in '' Things Fall Apart'' the background is one of dramatic change with the arrival of European missionaries who impose their religion, beliefs and worldviews and this in turn dramatically changes the lifestyle of the Igbo community.  The dissolution of their set of values and religion is triggered by the British colonialism.

At the beginning of the novel, Umofia is presented as a well-orchestrated tribe which has its own organization, distribution of power, religion and so on, but as the book goes on everything literally falls apart since the missionaries took over the tribe, imposing their laws, evangelizing them and turning them into Christians. Throughout the book, The shift from an old era to a new one is clearly shown. The former refers to the way of life that the tribes had before the arrival of the white men and the latter to the new system imposed by the European men.  It is important to bear in mind the theory of the gyres that we covered in previous sessions. Yeats proposes that there are 2 gyres spiraling upwards and downwards, growing wider and wider until they reach their climax and retrace to the opposite direction, shifting from one era to another. Chinua Achebe uses this theory as to present the change in which Umofia is immersed, the transition the tribe is facing, the profound social entropy the tribe is going through.

What are the traces of modernism you can identify in things fall apart? What other similarities can you come up with regarding the relation between the poem and the novel? How does this relation between the poem and the novel shape the whole story of ‘’Things Fall Apart’’?