Is there anything left to say about Ghost World?

To say that Ghost World is as crude as reality may be an overstatement. Yet through his novel, Daniel Clowes achieves to wake in the readers, some feeling of self-identification with the universe contained in it, its characters and their unique traits. How everything is laid out and how the reader can relate in one way or another to the adventures of Enid and Rebecca and, at the same time, feel puzzled because neither the main characters nor the reader know where everything is going, make Ghost World a great reflection of what transition is like for us at any given moment of our lives.


Although I wasn't really able to identify myself with any of the characters and their issues, one thing that called my attention was the evident lack of clarity in the future of Enid and Rebecca, while it seems like all the characters who surround them have already settled for something to live and work for.


This blurriness brings to my head one issue that is really common nowadays. Here in Chile, and in many other countries, there's a group of young people that neither study nor work. In our country, according to INJUV and the CASEN survey, around half a million men and women between 20 and 29 years old are unemployed and don't belong to any kind of educational institution. (lun.com) This is certainly more complicated for women, who represent 72% of that half a million (universia.cl), because quite often teen pregnancy happens and they have to make themselves responsible of their children. Then it is more difficult for them to find a job or enter an educational institution and take proper care of their children.

Although Enid and Rebecca had just finished school, there is the possibility that they end up becoming part of this group. Throughout the whole novel, they seem to be enjoying their apparent "freedom" from responsibility, school and work and, despite their certain eagerness to arrive to adulthood, they appear scared sometimes.

Toward the end of the novel, though, we can see that in a certain way, Enid and Rebecca end up accepting whatever comes, no matter what that is. They seem to have settled for something, which is definitely better than nothing, and keep on with their lives, that still are left in blurriness for the reader.


(Best) References (Ever)

www.lun.com
www.universia.cl

Women viewed by Hemingway and Achebe.

Probably, only by reading these two surnames, you will know a little about these important authors background and legacy that they left it the world literature. Ernest Hemingway was an American Nobel-prize winner author and journalist famous by his particular style in writing. The other writer, Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist best known for having written one of the most important books in the African modern literature. Both of them had an impact in their respective cultures and had several notable works but I would like to focus in a particular point of view expressed in some of their work: the way they look women as their role in these writers’ work.

At the moment of reading Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” -- a short story about abortion -- I thought his style and how he developed the story was impressive. Being honest I really liked and enjoyed it. However, I did some research and I actually read some critics like this one that shows off how in the most of Hemingway’s work, women have been portrait as “ignorant” and even “submissive”. Actually, giving the short story another read, I agreed that the role of the woman is completely dominated by this man who is persuading her to commit an abortion. The content is there, but for some reason it is overshadowed and made it less important that actually it is.

In order to understand more Hemingway’s view on women here is one famous quote:

“A woman ruined Scott [Fitzgerald]. It wasn’t just Scott ruining himself. But why couldn’t he have told her to go to hell? Because she was sick. It’s being sick makes them act so bloody awful usually and it’s because they’re sick you can’t treat them as you should. The first great gift for a man is to be healthy and the second, maybe greater, is to fall [in] with healthy women. You can always trade one healthy woman in on another. But start with a sick woman and see where you get. Sick in the head or sick anywhere. But sick anywhere and in a little while they are sick in the head. If they locked up all the women who were crazy — but why speculate — I’ve known goddamned good ones; but take as good a woman as Pauline — a hell of a wonderful woman — and once she turns mean. Although, of course, it is your own actions that turn her mean. Mine I mean. Not yours. Anyway let’s leave the subject. If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her. It would save enough trouble in the end even if they hanged you.”
— Hemingway to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, 1943

On the other hand, Chinua Achebe’s perspective of women is not as direct as Hemingway’s. For example, as reading Things Falling Apart you may blame the society of the book for exploiting and relegating women to domestic housework. Men are clearly superior than any woman a they can marry the times they might wish. The women in the story tend to be always weak and inferior. It is understood the story is fictional but why this reality that Achebe shows us must be pretty similar to the real world? However, in Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Achebe portrays a woman as one of the most important characters of this story by creating her independent and with a feminist view.

In my opinion, fictional literature should always try to cover topics without stereotypes or discrimination. By keep writing or ignoring the way women were considered by that time is a manner of perpetuating discrimination eternally, just I did even notice it while reading “Hills like White Elephants”.

Interest Links: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3186323/Macho-author-Ernest-Hemingway-s-mother-raised-little-girl-twin-older-sister-stunning-photos-prove.html

Marginalization of Women in Chinua Achebe's Things falling apart

"Watchmen". More than just a graphic novel

Watchmen is a very famous graphic novel written by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ‘collaboration in the drawings. It was published by DC comics in 1986, and even it was adapted to a film in 2009. Mainly, this novel shows us a darker world than the one we know surrounded by superheroes, heroes and villains. When I heard about watchmen at very first time was because the movie. To me was amazing to see that plot and variety of different heroes. After that I realized that this astonishing film was based on a graphic novel.

However, I am not interested in telling the story or going deeper in its plot. The point I would like to highlight is that to me there are many aspects about this novel that make it outstanding and that is the reason why those called my attention. The first one is that to me is the fact that Alan Moore show us a version of superheroes mostly different from the classical one. In this novel we can see how some masked heroes look for justice and fight crime despite being detested by the same people they protect. It is not the story of the muscular superhero saving the beautiful girl, it is a story deeper even complex at some point.

Another feature is the mixture of colors. If we compare for instance the film adaptation with the graphic novel itself, we can realize that there is a marked difference between them. The graphic novel uses a very limited range of colors that you could even underestimate the novel at the first glance. Nevertheless, this is not an impediment to realize that this is a masterpiece in the genre.

Another important aspect to me about Watchmen is that Alan Moore implies in his novel something that maybe we have not payed attention to in other genres or similar, such as comics. He, at some point in the novel, presents a scene where Walter Kovacs begs for having his "face" back. He mplies that his real face or identity is the version of him wearing the mask, being Rorschach. This means that heroes to some extent become in the hero itself. Thy kind of forgetting about their real identity, who they really are.

In conclusion, it is a fact that this graphic novel signified a before and after in the novel realm that we know. Its reception was so positive since it was published that even it is said that use of the term “graphic novel” to describe this kind of genre was due to this novel, the spectacular “Watchmen”

Sources

Moore, A. (1986). Watchmen. New York: DC Comics.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night beyond the fiction

Long day’s journey into the night is a play written by Eugene O’Neil and published posthumously in 1956. This play has to do with family problems caused by a variety of reasons. As we might notice while reading the play, from the very beginning of the story problems and tension take place on the scene. As we read it, many different difficulties start to converge in the development of a story. A mother who is probably, a morphine addicted; a son affected by tuberculosis according to the symptoms he has; another son with alcoholic problems and a father characterized by being stingy. To my mind, the saddest part about this story is that, virtually no member of this family try to make a change in order to have a better family relation and life. They choose to play dumb as nothing really happens.

Despite the fact that O’Neill’s characters in the play are supposed to be fictional, as we are reading and above all, if we know a bit about his life, it is possible to notice the fact that what is told in the play is nothing less than his own story of life. When I read the play I thought this is a very sad and tragic story, however when I was told that it was based on O’Neill´s story of life, that play got even sadder.

There are several aspects of this play that seem interesting to me and at the same time called my attention. One of those was the fact that at least to me what O’Neill tried to do by adapting his life to a play, was to forget for a moment that his story of life had happened that way. Perhaps, he wanted his story to be fiction from the very beginning. A tragic story which when curtains go down on stage, will be part of an outstanding play and performance, instead of being part of real life.

Another important aspect about this play, is the fact there is an open ending which does not limit us to give the story the final we want to. In a way, we could guess this story will even worse, nevertheless we have to consider that maybe thing might go right in time. The true ending of this play is up to the reader.

Finally, the last relevant aspect about this play, has to with the fact we, as readers, tend to feel identified with the story. No all families have such problems, however many of them have had to be through tough times. In many families, addictions of any kind as well as unexpected and mortal diseases become a huge problem in order to have a good and peaceful life. However, unlike this story, we can decide to make a change if we expect that our difficulties go better in the future.

Sources

O'Neill, E. (1956). Long Day’s Journey Into Night. London: Yale University Press.

The importance of Edmund.

Every family has a glue that keeps them together. The Simpsons have love and viewers, the Kardashians money, the Brady Bunch the 70’s and the Tyrones have Edmund.

Edmund is one of the characters of the play Long day’s journey into night by Eugene O’Niell.

The play is about the tragedy of a family which integrants are tormented by different problems and addictions, and they attempt to feel normal through a performance.

The play has so many aspects that goes from the lack of interest for each other to the fact that any of them wants to take the responsibility for their mistakes, that is impossible not to pay extra attention to Edmund.

In the middle of all the drama this character is kind of the victim. Maybe is just that he was doomed from birth but all the problems around him seems to find the inflection point in him.

Even though I always try to find the flaws in every character in a play like this, I just conclude that Edmund is a victim of the circumstances. Furthermore he is essential to the story giving the idea that the other characters are human and that is because he is trigger for all the family members but they all see more identifiable.

He brings the poetry into the play and his attempt to transcend using poetry in his speech gives them one of the unforgettable parts in the play.

Beyonds that he use poetry as a way to survive and that represents all the artist in their own dysfunctional backgrounds.

Edmund is sick and he is an alcoholic, but besides that everything else about him is so dark, deep and melancholic that is impossible not to fall in love with his character.

Is it anger the answer?

Almost once in a lifetime people tend to question themselves what has happened to the world they used to know and to that life they wanted to live. This mostly happens when you are getting old or a lot of changes have reshaped the reality you used to live in or when you feel stuck in life. So how is someone supposed to react to this fact that cannot be run away from? With anger seems to be the answer given by Osborne in his play “Look back in anger” (1956), where Jimmy feels nothing but frustrated and irritated and decides to show his emotions by being angry with life. But why? Can a situation be so terrible that the only way of facing it is through anger?

During the 1950’s the post-Second World War England, unlike The United States of America, was going through a crisis as a nation since its time of glory had passed. Many citizens felt that something had died in the country and in themselves as well, but no one was brave enough to realize what it was. Literature has worked as a means of expression for artists to depict some of the issues that concern society in a certain period. However, for the time being, English playwrights did not seem eager to show what the reality of the country- and more importantly of the lower classes- was. That was until Osborne chose to deal in one of his literary works with this theme and to express his disaffection towards a country that was not giving assistance to the ones who need it.

Having shared his play with the world, Osborne became known as the artist who started the “Angry Young Men” movement, which was not more than a group of –mainly working class- playwrights and novelists who were educated post-war and got the chance to go to the university but still were able to perceive the hypocrisy of the upper-media class and the injustice in which they were living: they would never be as educated as the rich ones or have the same opportunities as them.

In Look back in Anger, Jimmy questions the newspapers, his wife’s lack of reaction to the situations lived in their house, and his friend’s lack of interest on what surrounds him. Jimmy finds it difficult to feel excited and no one really understands him because no one has suffered as he has. Everything is still the same as it was before the War, but to him it seems so evident that they are living in a status quo. He even ironizes: “Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive.” (Osborne, 1956). By and large, Osborne is only sharing his concerns through Jimmy’s eyes.

If on the one hand we have Jimmy angry because nothing has changed and his dreams cannot be achieved, on the other hand we have Alisson’s father who seems to be nostalgic about the time he spent in India, where he was delightful, however, now he knows that times will not come back and wishes nothing had ever changed. Allison smartly said to his father “You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?” (Osborne, 1956). But wait… he did not react with anger… Maybe because he had already felt on the top of the mountain and discovered how wonderful life could be when you have the opportunity to experience what you want to; unlike Jimmy who live in the uncertainty of what could be like to be able to actually reach what you aim at, if given the opportunity…

Let us talk about another example: Enid and Rebecca in Ghost World. Both girls are going through the transition from being an adolescent to an adult, which means that you have to face real life, pick a University and leave your hometown and friends. In their case, they also choose to face these radical changes with anger by criticizing the world and the people they know, as a way of refusing to accept leaving their conform zone. Their profoundly fear the upcoming changes, that they finally end up their friendship. 

“Enid: Look, I didn’t say you couldn’t come with me… Ii just feel weird about it… You can still come…

Rebecca: Well, maybe I don’t! I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything… I just want it to be like it was in high school!” (Clowes, 1998)

So, is it anger the final answer? Maybe it is, or maybe not. You can only know how your reaction is going to be once experiencing frustration, and feeling like the characters in these two workarts felt.

References

Clowes, D. (1998). Ghost World. Canada: Thompson Groth.

Osborne, J. (1957). Look back in anger. New York: Criterion Books.

Maus: a post-modern tale

Maus it’s a Pulitzer winner graphic novel by Art Spiegelman written in two separated parts. It is an alternative comic first published in Raw magazine. The novel shows the author interviewing his father about his experience in the Holocaust and then as he tells the story it shows his experience in images.

I’m not going to go further into the story since the Second World War is a very well-known historic event, instead I will talk about the literary movements that influenced the author when writing and drawing this masterpiece.

For me, the most important and interesting aspect about this graphic novel is the fact that combines important aspects of post modernism and modernism. Post modernism aspects such as feeling of fragmentation and discontinuity in which reality is taken as an imitation of real life, and the reconceptualization of the self-image, the society and the history, the unexisting relations between time and narration, fragmenting the reality with time jumps are found thought the whole novel. However, it also have some aspects of modernism such as genre experimentation, in this case the combination of drawing and narratives; novel and biography; and stories within a story among others narrative devices (Study.com, 2015). Also, it can be either labelled as fiction or non-fiction. In other words, this graphic novel challenge all conventional labels.

This novel not only talks about Jews and the Holocaust, is not a typical tale about the horrors of the Second World War, but is the personal story of Vladek, the author’s father, but more deeply of Art himself. As a second generation of holocaust survivors he didn’t experienced the Holocaust by himself, he only knows what he has been told, however, he has the same expectations of what a holocaust survivor should be and act like,  and his entire life has been influenced by this event whether he likes it or not . 

In this part of the novel Artie is expected to give a critic message about the Holocaust but as a post- modern writer he has a divergence between ideology, what he is expected to answer, and his personal intention since this graphic novel is really about personal experience and not an historical novel, even though the context in which its developed is one of the most famous and controversial events in history.

However his divergence, he still knows that as a second generation he has the duty to show respect toward the Holocaust survivors and toward his family, so he perpetuates their memories through his drawings, 

Postmodernism influences the author imagination, the atrocity of war are seen as bestial acts, however, these bestial acts were carry out by human, by neighbours and people from the same country, not by beasts, so he reconceptualise this  reality, illustrating it in the way it deserve, using animals to tell a story that is fantasy in paper but a horrible true in real life. These animals represent people with different kind of values. Germans are drawn as soulless cats, and we all know how cats are like, they kill for pleasure but first they play with their victims inflicting them as much pain as they can; Jews are represented as helpless mice, a cat favourite prey who were exterminate as a plague; Polish are represented as treacherous dirty pigs; and Allies are represented as dog, a man’s best friend, the one that will always help you and be by your side in case of danger. 

However, even is Spiegelman tells that the story is about a personal story and not a recrimination for what happened, these same representations of people from different nationalities can be seen as a reinforcement of a fatidic stereotype that do no good to the process of reconciliation and forgiveness. 

Sidenote:

This video shows a comparison among the graphic novel and the real  events that took place during the Holocaust. The same pictures that are found in the cartoon can be seen as they really were, 

Study.com, (2015). Postmodernism in Literature: Definition, Lesson & Quiz - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com. [online] Available at: http://study.com/academy/lesson/postmodernism-in-literature-definition-lesson-quiz.html [Accessed 19 Aug. 2015].

Hail Maus

This was the cover of "La segunda" a Chilean paper during the 70s under Pinochet's dictatorship. Perhaps you are asking yourself what has this to do with a literary blog. Well, I could not help myself of thinking about this particular header while I started reading Art Spiegelman's "Maus". A graphic novel which shows the plight which his father Vladek went through for being a Jew during the German Nazi invasion of Poland, however, the story does not deal exclusively with this topic but also with many aspects of his life. 











Since the very beginning of this graphic novel the author uses the own Nazi philosophy to criticize their doings. take a look to the epigraph of it.

“The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.”

This cite, my dear fellow readers, was written by the very Adolph Hitler in his "Mein Kampf" a book that is considered by many the underpinning of the Nazi ideology, but why?







Chinua Achebe's full interview for CNN African voices.




To my mind, this is liken to what Chinua Achebe does on his writings. He said on an interview for CNN African voices "they were depicted as definitely not European, they were incapable of creating a civilization, of sustaining one"speaking about the stereotype that Europeans had towards African people. Furthermore, he started to use the language of the conquerors to deny this stereotype and probe that African culture was different but still very rich.

Coming back to Maus, I have to say that I am just a layman on the holocaust topic, and a think that really draw my attention was the fact that the own Jewish people acted as the Jew police who helped the Nazis to control and arrest their own fellows. When I read it, I immediately recall a discussion we had in class about "The Harlem Renaissance"  and the uncle Tom concept, which, surprisingly for me, is defined by Webster as:

1: a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals)

2 :  a member of a low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority.

Well, the Jewish police fits pretty well in that definition, but also does it the Chilean soldiers during the dictatorship because most, if not all, of the soldiers were young Chilean men who were part of the same people they were persecuting, whether voluntarily or forced by fear.






Regarding the writing style, I think Spiegelman being a cartoonist had the opportunity to, more or less, convey what his father felt when he survived the holocaust in the Nazi concentration camp. Doing a graphic novel with his father story was the bull-eye that made this work a Pulitzer winner, because language being an arbitrary system of sign cannot reliably depict reality, (do you remember our old pal Saussure signifier/signified). However, having the drawings and the testimony of an actual holocaust survivor helped him to go beyond from just words.

For example, take a look at  the left frame of this extract of the graphic novel, Vladek and his wife Anja had nowhere to go. they where being persecuted by Nazis and no one wanted to help them. The roads forming a swastika convey the meaning that wherever they would go, Nazis will be there,as well, to caught them. Also, I could feel his despair and hopelessness.






Furthermore, for me the allegory of using humans wearing animal masks (oops spoiler), Germans using cat masks and Jews using rat ones, besides Spiegelman keep on ironing the Nazi view of Jews,  is used to depict how naturalized the violence against them was seen since it is natural that the cat kill the mouse.





Finally, despite the fact that Jews went through the holocaust, I do not think that they learned a lesson out of it because what Israel is doing to Palestinian people nowadays is not too different from what the Nazis did to them.





Do you think that humanity after seeing a number of episodes like the holocaust will ever learn a lesson?

References:

-Art Spiegelman. (1986). Maus. New York: Pantheon books.

Maus: more than a story about The Holocaust

Many artists, from poets to dancers, have admitted that they see their art as a way of releasing all their emotions and showing their reality. For instance, the poet Langston Hughes always argues that he wrote about his own experiences as a black person because he wanted everyone to know how being a “negro” was. However, he used also his poetry as a way of showing the other poets that black artists were capable of creating masterpieces too. For Art Spiegelman, his greatest work “Maus” was not only the means he chose to share his father’s experience during the Holocaust, but also an opportunity for him to actually have a relationship with his father. In his own words: “as an adult, I just had no relationship to speak of, but kind of wanted one, wanted a way to come to terms with him, and this book afforded that by giving me the relationship of interviewer and interviewee to replace son and father”.

Maus is a graphic novel that recreated the experiences lived by Vladek Spiegelman during the Holocaust. In the book, Jewish are depicted as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. Art has stated in many interviews that this was not a metaphor created by him, instead, he depicted the metaphor Hitler had come up with. He relied on both modernism and postmodernism views of art so as to tell a story through images and words because each separately was not enough to describe the impact that this event had on his family and on all the people who lived during that time.

As stated above, Spiegelman’s Maus explored the tension between this father and son, who do not get along well. We discover that their relationship is distant from the very beginning, when Art says: “I went out to see my father in Rego Park. I hadn’t seen him in a long time- we weren’t that close” (Maus, 1980). Nevertheless, the first pages showed a little son whose father was there for him when things got hard, as any present parent does. But, Spiegelman doesn't glamorise his father as some kind of hero. Vladek comes across as irritating, manipulative, exasperating, and even bigoted." (Talbot, 2012). Then, what happened with them? The Holocaust.

After the Second World War, Vladek’s compulsive behavior started bothering his son, who decided to take distance from his father. However, as his father gets old, he regrets the decision of not having spent enough time with him or even having not helped him when he asked for help to fix a drain on the roof. Art starts feeling guilty because he had not realized that his father’s behavior was completely justified by the events that he had to go through when in the Nazi concentration camps, which affected him even more after his wife (Art’s mother) committed suicide. In 1991, Spiegelman admitted that sympathizing with his father was very difficult since they were from different generations, but he knew he had to try to understand what kind of survivor his father was.

But Art is not the only artist whose story about family issues became the greatest work he had published. O’Neill’s play “Long Day’s Journey into Night” published post mortem, deals with the ugliest aspects of a dysfunctional family who do not want to accept that they are a conflicted family, so they perform as a normal family do. His mother has tried to commit suicide several times as she cannot get over his son Edmund’s death and a brother who had to live with the ghost of his dead brother and was killed metaphorically before even having the chance to live.

O’Neill, as well as Art, found consolation in writing about their concerns and both changed the view of literary works in their respective field of work. They changed the cannons of theater and graphic novels respectively by writing with a realistic style.

There must be an important number of artists who find shelter in their artworks. It seems to be that literary works that are based on the author’s real deepest concerns are the ones who get more recognized by the people since they can actually relate to what is exposed in those works. Do you think artists base their works on their life because they know they have success guaranteed?

P.S: Here you have the link to watch the interview where Spiegelman talked about his relationship with his father. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBudVI0Rri0&spfreload=10

References

Spiegelman, A. (1980) Maus: A Ssurvivor's Tale. London: Pinguin Books.

Talbot, B. (2012). Book of a lifetime: Maus by Art Spiegelman. 

Representations of Masculinity and its relations with the Igbo culture in Achebe's Things Fall Apart

While I was reading Achebe's Things Fall Apart, I noticed that there were several moments in the story which highlighted masculinity and its importance within the Igbo tribe, so I decided to look for more information related to it. The first essay that caught my eye was Chinua's “African Literature as Restoration,” where I found the following quote:

“I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them” (Achebe, C. 1975)

This quote reinforced my beliefs about masculinity and gender being an important issue in this novel, and that it was one of the messages Achebe was trying to convey with it.

To begin with, it is paramount to understand what was the original (and obsolete) place of masculinity in the Igbo culture, and what being masculine meant. For Okonkwo's clan, in very vague terms, being masculine meant being strong enough to provide for one's family, fight in wars (if needed) and have at least one title. Okonkwo, instead, due to his tough childhood and background (his father owed everyone at the moment of his death and did not work a day in his life), took the tribe's tradition a bit too far; he wanted to be the exact opposite of his father.

His determination towards being masculine lead him to a successful life, in which he worked hard to provide for his three wives and his children. In fact, in the eyes of Okonkwo, it was so important for a clansman to be masculine that he was more bound to his adoptive child than to his own. Actually, he was more bond to his daughter than he was with Nwoye, who was never deemed promising since he felt attracted to child stories and disgusted by violence. In the end, Nwoye betrayed his clan as well as their beliefs by joining the English. 

"In a flash Okonkwo drew his machete. The messenger crouched to avoid the
blow. It was useless. Okonkwo's machete descended twice and the man's head lay beside his uniformed body." (Things fall apart, p.151)

Eventually I discovered not only how aggressive Okonkwo was, but also another reason behind this feature of his. Somehow, just like his son, he was not strong either, he was effeminate and afraid of change. Okonkwo was overattached to his culture to the point of fundamentalism, and he was willing to defend his ancestors' beliefs with his life.

His blindness was shared by the English invaders and, to a certain extent, the Ibo. The former were as aggressive as Okonkwo. They based their beliefs on the holy bible, a document that could not be argued against for it was God's word and there was no way they would ever negotiate. The latter, though not as masculine as the English anymore, also based their beliefs on something they were not willing to give up: their ancestors' experiences, which gave birth to the proverbs they used when speaking.

 

"Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs
are the palm-oil with which words are eaten." (Things fall apart, p.5)

Despite being masculinity, along with the strength it entails, the clan's tool for survival throughout history, it was also the clan's bane. In a mixture of fear of losing his own identity and shame of his clansman's cowardice, Okonkwo took his own life. After all, resistance is a man's feature.

References:

http://reading.cornell.edu/reading_project_05/documents/Scanlon.pdf

Achebe, Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration.” Petersen and Rutherford 1-18. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975.

Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo. (1999). "Chinua Achebe Writing Culture : Representations of Gender and Tradition in Things Fall Apart." in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 148-164.

Quayson, Ato. (1994). "Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" with an Evaluation of the Criticism Relating to It." in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 117-136