Things Falling Apart: Societies in Irreversible Transition in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and St. Luke’s Gospel

A text interacts with and references other texts. Meaning is a dialogue between different works. No text, as such, exists in isolation. This study is a critical reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a representation of communities on the verge of irreversible transition. Achebe’s novel is read as an imitation, though ‘not quite,’ of Judeo-Christian societies. The kernel of the argument in this study is that Achebe’s story, in many ways, bears a close semblance to Judaic and Christian societies in St. Luke’s Gospel. Using deconstructionist theory, I critique the novel as a composite of biblical contexts and sub-texts. These contexts and sub-texts lend the novel to multiple interpretations. The sub-texts run into biblical sub-texts. The novel, this study concludes, represents a society on the verge of a major transition. Colonialism irreversibly disrupts the Umuofian cultural order, things fall apart, opening room for a radical shift in the architecture of the looming dispensation.