Stock Characters

As we’ve read previously, Chinua Achebe is very opposed to Joseph Conrad and his portrayal of Africa and its people, especially in Heart of Darkness. It is because of this, and also because of his strong knowledge of African culture, that Things Fall Apart does everything that Heart of Darkness does not, as well as not doing everything that Heart of Darkness does. The most obvious example of this can be found by comparing the white characters in Heart of Darkness to those in Things Fall Apart, and doing the same to the African characters in both novels.

In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist (Marlow) is white, and so is every other main character (including Mr. Kurtz, who can be argued to be both a protagonist and an antagonist). All of the dialogue is spoken by white characters, except for a few exceptions, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead” being the most prominent. Although the novel has a fairly progressive view of how African natives should be treated, it is still told from a white perspective. Finally, no African character is named or even fully described. A dying man here, to further an ominous tone; a few body parts here, to compare the jungle to an animal; and a sex symbol, to...do something. In a novel about Africa, this is all we see of the people who live there.

Meanwhile, in Things Fall Apart, no white characters appear until the last few chapters of the book. Each character is African, each character has plenty to say, and each character is complex and unmistakably human. There are characters who are abusive and characters who are murderers, but there are also characters who do good things, and most of these are characters that can be supported and related to. When the white characters do show up, they are not nearly as three-dimensional as the African characters. Most of them are unnamed, and the two that are named strike the reader as very stereotypical, one a faithful and loving preacher and one a fierce and angry one, both characters that many have seen many times before.

Both novels carry a great deal of stereotyping. However, Heart of Darkness shows a harmful and antiquated stereotype of Africans, while Things Fall Apart shows a rarely seen and benign stereotype of white people. What they lack in representing one race, though, they make up for in the other. Achebe likely did this on purpose: to turn the genre on its head, to showcase his viewpoint as an African man, and, probably, to show all the ways that Conrad went wrong.