soooo my thoughts are things fall apart are rather surface level, i apologize. with a novel like this it takes me a little to process exactly whats happening and the lecture today left me thinking even more about the book!
for one, it was quite confusing at first and i was constantly having to look back to make sure who this person or this person was. there were so many characters! it was so hard to keep track of them, haha, i ended up drawing a little relations chart so i could get it all worked out and less confused.
even with jon’s explanation on how achebe and conrad are connected, im still kind of struggling to see the full connections. at first i thought that achebe was a direct response to conrad, but now that ive read the text it doesnt actually stand out as much as i thought.
one thing i did notice about the book is that there are a lot of little scenes that happen in the book and it just leaves me wondering why it happened, like ezinma being taken and her mother following and okonokwo i THINK just took her home? or did he take both of them home? it also jumped between timelines a lot, like explaining how okonkwo would persevere and provide for his father and then it would immediately jump to the “current” season and i wouldn’t get until after the chapter ended that almost 20 or 30 something years have passed. so much confusion! man, maybe im just super bad at picking up on these things. i feel like ill end up reading this book again before the in class essay anyway, so i hope the seminars help me figure some stuff out.
nicole
I agree that there are some things left entirely unclear, like specifically that episode you mentioned where Ezinma is taken by the priestess and then returned. No explanation. I’m not sure what to make of that, honestly. I’m trying, but failing to come up with a good “reading.” And yes, there was a fair bit of jumping around the timeline in the beginning, and I had to re-read the first couple of chapters a few times to get what was going on. So it’s not just you!