Differences in Interpretations

For school my World Lit. class had to read the book "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. So i read the book and was unimpressed by the way it was written and the plot; but i did get the character developments, the plot, and some of the meaning. After i read it my dad read the book just because he was interested in it. When he got done he told me what he thought of the book and said that it was not well written, and that the main character was inconsistent as the book ended. We both agreed that the main character had major ego issues and could only blame himself for the tribulations that he went through.

The part where we differed was at the end where the main character kills himself. My dad's explanation for that was the author just wrote himself into a corner and needed a scapegoat to get out of it. My dad said it should ended with Okonkwo dying in a blaze of glory while fighting the missionaries and that it would have been consistent with the character's ego and mentality.

I said to him that the author had Okonkwo kill himself because he spent his whole life trying not to be like his father who had no "title" (basically his dad was a slacker). So he worked hard and had his enormous male ego to go with it. He has an nonhuman personality and shows no pain or anything that is considered "weak." Okonkwo would always take the hard way to show no weakness; but in the end with killing himself he showed human qualities. He knew the missionaries were going to kill him and he took the easy way out by committing suicide. Thus, he did not take the difficult way to show strength, but rather he showed weakness and that in the end he was human .