Things Fall Apart by
Chinua Achebe
September 22, 2011
Vocabulary Fakebook Pages
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William Butler Yeats: "The
Second Coming" (1921)
The poem was written after the catastrophe of
World War I and with communism rising.
Yeats believed that history in part moved in two
thousand-year cycles.
The Christian era, which followed that of the
ancient world, was about to give way to an
ominous period represented by the rough, pitiless
beast in the poem.
"The Second Coming"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
A Gyre is a Spiral, making the figure of a cone.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the
desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries
of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at
last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Things Fall Apart
► 1958
► Nigeria
► Ibo
Culture
► Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930
► Story based on events of Achebe’s
grandfather- Okonkwo
Three Parts
► 1.
The life of the Ibo people before the
arrival of white people
► 2. Okonkwo’s seven years of exile and the
arrival of the colonial culture.
► 3. How the white people’s law, education,
power and economics strangle and destroy
the whole Ibo culture.
Character Charts
► Create
Name
a character chart in your notebook:
Description
Quote pg #
Include: Amalinze, Okonkwo, Unoka, Okoye,
Ikemefuna, Ezeugo, & Nwoye
Read Chapter 1
► What
does “proverbs are the palm-oil with
which words are eaten” mean?
Read Chapter 2
► What
effect does the night have on the
people?
► What do they fear?
► What is the conflict with Mbaino?
Read Chapter 3
► Who
is Agbala?
► How is awareness of rank observed in the
drinking of the palm wine?
► How does share-cropping work?
► What is women’s relationship to agriculture?
Homework
► Study
for test tomorrow► Vocabulary
► Kaffir
► “The
Boy in America
Voter”