On Death Writing In Chinua Achebe’s Novels

Chinua Achebe(1930-2013)was born in Nigeria.He is known as the “father of African Literature” because he wrote English novels from the inner world of Africans.He is a prolific writer,composing novels,poems,essays,and children’s stories.His most famous novels are Things Fall Apart(1958),No Longer at Ease(1960),Arrow of God(1964),A Man of the People(1966),and Anthills of the Savannah(1987).In these novels,Achebe integrates the rough personal experience and turbulent social history into the text,so as to form distinctive death writing.In Achebe’s novels,the forms of characters’ death are complex and diverse.His death writing focuses on all kinds of intensified social contradictions,such as the marginal people who sacrifice African traditional culture,the desperate heroes coerced by the tragic fate,and the modern elites who struggle to resist in a special period.In these texts,death is not only about the physical end,but also about the spiritual fall.From the body to the spirit,from literature to society,these novels show Achebe’s profound insight into the living conditions of mankind in an all-round way.Through classifying the images associated with death,the thesis reveals the evolution of death consciousness in Achebe’s novels.Achebe’s death consciousness has gone through the changes from the traditional to the modern,from enjoying life and detesting death in the early stage,to upholding individualism in the middle stage,and finally to enjoying life and detesting death in the later stage.If Achebe’s childhood experience and cultural education are the origin of his death consciousness,it is colonial rule and military coup that render him think deeper about death.These five novels contain the beauty of authenticity of those people cherishing life,and the tragic beauty of clan heroes and modern elites in desperate condition,but also convey sublimity of intellectuals’ heroic dedication to ideals and beliefs.Those departed lives not only show Achebe’s unique aesthetics of death thoroughly,but also trigger readers’ independent thinking on the existence of life.