Okonkwo, A Tragic Hero

Aristotle defines a tragic hero to be a character instilled into a story with the intention of evoking the audience with a sense of pity and fear. A tragic hero is considered to be a character that has been tackled with misfortune through an "error of judgement" that eventually spirals into their downfall. Now, considering the cultural context of Chinua Achebe, why would he choose to characterise Okonkwo using the tragic hero archetype?

Initially, Okonkwo is characterised with his hamartia being his fear of failure and his fear of weakness. These two tragic flaws are driven by Okonkwo's fear of ending up like his unsuccessful father. With that, he begins to strive for success and masking his fragility with a hypermasculinity and a facade that lacks emotion. These traits can also be deemed as his hubris, and are introduced to the audience early in the story when Okonkwo beat his wife during Peace week. These flaws drive the protagonist of Things Fall Apart to make numerous mistakes that drive the audiences through the plotline; starting with his involvement in killing Ikmenfuna all the way through the end of the story in which the character commits suicide. 

Making the protagonist a tragic hero, with a fate that is considered shameful in the stories cultural context, Achebe pushes the significance of the entire story. If, as an audience, we were introduced to this story through a traditional hero, we would not become exposed to the conflicts that shape the story and its historical context. Things Fall Apart was written to challenge the single story stereotype that English literature upheld at the time. To correctly prevail this, the author could not present to us his culture as a small single story, because simply it is not. The history of the Igbo tribe and the issues they had faced could not be put into simple terms in order to be entirely comprehended. The complex character of Okonkwo is put through many situations due to his tragic hero status; through those situations, western literature is introduced to the Igbo people through their reactions to all those situations individually. Allowing us to understand the culture in depth and through a variety of situations. Thus diminishing any possibility of a single story. 

By portraying Okonkwo as a tragic hero, Achebe constructs a gateway in which allows the intended audience (English literates) to be introduced to the Igbo people from various perspectives that if Okonkwo wasn't a tragic hero wouldn't be possible.