Temporal Structures and Colonial Tensions: A Genettean Reading of Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease

This article examines the interplay between narrative temporality and colonial tensions in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease through the lens of Gérard Genette's narratology. By focusing on Genette's categories of order, duration, frequency, and narrative voice, the study demonstrates how Achebe's temporal structures embody the disjunctures and conflicts of the colonial encounter. Shifts in chronology, oscillations between repetition and singularity, and variations in narrative perspective not only shape the reader's experience of time but also mirror the destabilizing effects of colonial domination and cultural negotiation. The article argues that Genettean temporal analysis, when placed in dialogue with postcolonial critique, reveals how Achebe's novels resist linear, Eurocentric historiographies by inscribing fractured, plural, and contested experiences of time. In doing so, the study highlights the narratological dimension of Achebe's project of cultural recovery and its broader implications for rethinking the relationship between narrative form and colonial history.