Part Three: Things really fall apart.

In theater there is comedy and tragedy. Comedy ends with a marriage, with the hope and promise for things to come. Indeed, some of the more detailed sections on customs have had to do with marriage in this book—these have been the happy sections as well.
But of course this book ends as a tragedy—in death. With a difference. In most cases the tragedy confirms the right to rule of the king in the tragedy and reasserts a kind of stability in a court that has been in disorder. In this book there is no certainty at the end. The old order has certainly seemed to fail. The new order is rather unthinkable, especially given the district commissioner. Check events and then re-evaluate Okonkwo

A natural for Okoye?

Chapter 20. O’s return. He has great plans to return to status.
His upholding of religion is a violent kind of curse.
Note that he relies on returning with two unmarried daughters to “attract considerable attention.” How does this shed light on that most masculine of men, Okonkwo?
1098. The return to Umuofia finds the well established Kotma in place. Of course O’s instinct is to fight, immediately, without thinking of the consequences.
Obierka sums it up nicely when O asks if the white man understands their custom about land—“How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?”

Chapter 21. Money had followed into Umuofia. See the section on "early trading in palm products."
Mr. Brown. Here, if Achebe has designed the story around the dangers of extremes for O., he also gives us the mean, the person of moderation. For the Igbo society, there is Obierka, although a strong man f tradition, not a blind or fanatical one. And here we have Mr. Brown, who “preached against an excess of zeal” (1099).
1100. The exchange between Mr. Brown and Akunna is a terrific comparison of the two religions. (See Brown on the “loving father” aspect of the Christian God.)
1101: Here Mr. Brown’s ideal of education takes the form of prophesy.

Chapter 22. Mr. Smith is a different kind of man—a zealot. Extreminst.
“narrow is the way and few are the number” (1102).
Read the description of Enoch.
Even in the crisis, the egwugwu says “it is good that a man should worship the gods and spirits of his fathers.” (And note that on the day of the offence, the masked spirits were retiring in order that the Christian women be allowed to pass.)

Chapter 23. The “justice” of the District Commissioner. First the men are tricked into imprisonment. Then the order that they not be abused proves to have no teeth, and these “great men” are treated in a most humiliating fashion.

Chapter 24. Okonkwo muses “If Umuofia decided on war, all would be well. But if they chose to be cowards, he would go out and avenge himself.”
Okonkwo’s final action seems to be in the spirit of what the orator Okika was just declaiming. Yet, he knows then that Umuofia would not go to war. Seeming contradiction—or was the rest of the crowd waiting to side with Egonwanne?

Chapter 25. Here it is the hanged, disgraced Okonkwo. The DC is a kind of British figure—“the resolute administrator in him gave way to the student of primitive customs.”
The last paragraph comes to Achebe’s notion that the African is given short consideration in the annuls of Africa—from the whole chapter to the reasonable paragraph. Then of course the book title.
Okonkwo. His chi and how it went wrong. Look even at how tribal matters are settled and how he may be implicated by this last action.