The language of Things Fall Apart is one of its greatest literary contributions. It is packed with expressive

word pictures, creative parables, as well a native proverbs. The ability of the author Achebe to capture

the thoughts and feelings of the characters is superb.

The language of the Ibo is filled with word pictures. The phrase "Looking at a King’s Mouth, one would

think he never sucked at his mother’s breast" was used by an old man to describe Okonkwo’s hardness

of heart and his ability to "kill a man’s spirit". (p.28) In Okonkwo’s weaken condition, shortly after killing

Ikemefuna, the author tells us he felt like a drunken giant walking with the limbs of a mosquito. Even

using the term agbala or woman for a man who has taken no title is an especially powerful word picture

considering the place of women in the Ibo culture.

The parables told by the "people of the forest" in this work would best be described as nature fables for

most have to do with explaining the unknown world around them. The mosquito and the Ear story as

passed down from Okonkwo’s mother gives reason to that constant buzzing they dealt with. (p.72)

The tortoise who tricked the birds and was in turn tricked by them fell from the sky breaking his shell in

many pieces. Being pieced back together by a medicine man, he is the reason why the tortoise’s shell is

not smooth.(p.94) The story of the duckling and the kite (p.130) is a true parable in the sense that it gave

direction although not heeded by the men of Abame. They killed the missionary who said nothing. A

grave mistake for them according to this story by Okonkwo.

"Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten." Short familiar sayings to express a well-known

truth are found as an intricate part of the language. With no reference to any written language, these

proverbs were probably passed verbally from family to family throughout the generations. "When the

moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk" paints a picture of the events on a moonlit night

in comparison to the terror they held of the dark.(p.13,14) "A child’s fingers are not scalded by a piece of

hot yam which its mother puts into its palm."(p.64) Okonkwo used this idea to justify himself in killing

Ikemefuna and therefore shunned the idea of any harm coming to him or his family because he believed

that the Earth like a mother would not punish him for obeying her. A power of positive thought proverb

is found in Chapter four where the belief that when a man says yes his chi says yes and since Okonkwo

said yes very strongly; his chi agreed.

The power of the language in Things Fall Apart stays strong even to the very end where we see the

District Commissioner reducing Okonkwo’s life to the size of a "reasonable paragraph". Chinua Achebe’s

repeats a great proverb that goes "until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will

always glorify the hunter."1 He knows the danger of not having our own stories and he has created a

masterpiece of understanding in this work.