Epictetus once said “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” Epictetus was a promoter of Stoicism who flourished in the early second century C.E. about four hundred years after the Stoic school of Zeno of Citium was established in Athens. He lived and worked, first as a student in Rome, and then as a teacher with his own school in Nicopolis in Greece. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a man named Okonkwo and his choices in life are showcased. Okonkwo is a clear embodiment of the quote mentioned above. He is a man who works himself up from nothing and becomes something. The root cause of his actions throughout the novel are his subconscious feelings towards his Unoka, his father. The prevalent failures of Unoka fundamentally shapes Okonkwo’s actions as a husband and as a father.
Okonkwo is a man who truly started from the bottom. He did not have the head start in life which many young men had and was plagued by the fear of weakness and failure (13,16). Despite his situation, he began during his father’s lifetime to build the foundations of a prosperous future (18). His father’s example shapes his character in a way that he becomes “possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death” (18). In light of Unoka’s…show more content… When Unoka was alive, he was “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow” (4). This flaw influences Okonkwo to “stamp out the disquieting signs of laziness” (33) which “he thought he saw” in Nwoye, his son (32-33). Although Okonkwo knew the boys were still young and couldn’t yet fully grasp the difficulty of farming, he believed “that one could not begin to early” (33). He himself began to fend for his father’s house when he was only a boy (22). And Unoka’s failures ultimately shapes Okonkwo into the husband and father which he
