Modernism in Chinua Achebe’s African Tetralogy

Abstract

Analyzing Chinua Achebe’s tetralogy of novels, this chapter shows how Achebe addresses one of the central issues of both modernism and postcolonialism: the organization and conceptualization of time. Things Fall Apart (1958) and No Longer at Ease (1960) present snapshot moments of arrested temporality that Achebe treats with the modernist techniques of imagism and epiphany. Taking a more pessimistic turn, Arrow of God (1964) grounds the handling of sequentiality not in Igbo ideas of cyclical change but in Spenglerian, Yeatsian, and Eliotic notions of apocalypse, in which endings do not mark new beginnings but a point of terminal cessation. Finally, Man of the People (1966) further modifies this version of time, replacing the cultural collapse of the previous novel with the more affirmative vision of community and village life found in Eliot’s “East Coker.” In sum, the chapter traces the tetralogy’s evolution of divergent and competing notions of time, especially as they relate to Igboland and more generally to postcolonialism.