The Man Within // Things Fall Apart
Andrews, the main character in Graham Greene's The Man Within, seems to suffers from a pathological, perhaps genetic fearful mindset.
No matter what he does he's afraid of something and has to talk himself into and up to the task at hand. However, he does so not through self encouragement, but rather through an inner voice saying this will go wrong, that will happen, and so on and so on, and then refusing to give the voice control.
The story is about this fearful man being hunted by former alcohol smuggler colleagues, and running into a woman who helps save him. This fearful man has to take a lot of direct action.
It is uplifting that Andrews can repeatedly conquer his paranoia and fears and approach the police, testify in court, fall in love, and meet his old smuggler friends without breaking down. Those actions give us all hope that we too can overcome anything inside of us.
But yet this story is a tragedy.
I don't want to spoil the ending, but allow me to say that when the smugglers come for him and Elizabeth, his love, he has a predictable fight with himself that she helps resolve: "He looked up at her and said in a voice trembling on the brink of complete uncontrol, 'I'm afraid, I'm a coward.'" Elizabeth responds: "The old story... I know it's untrue." Andrews replies: "It's not. It's not."
Elizabeth then goes on to tell him all the brave stuff he has done: gone to the police, left her with his only weapon, turned in the criminals, traversed forests at night... and on and on. He's clearly heroic. And that makes what happens at the end all the more bizarre.
Andrews has particular mental patterns that he is aware of, he even speculates that his father is similar. Though he desires to change, though he knows how to change, he is afraid of doing so. He is apparently more comfortable wasting away in the fairy tale of his brain than braving the changes he needs to make, and his emotional laziness and intellectual cowardice ruin a lot of lives.
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Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is one of the best books ever written. If you read just one book this year, it should be this. It is of the class of literature, as Graham Green's novels are, that mean more than what's literally on the page. Tellingly, it starts with a worthy epithet:
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.
-WB Yeats, The Second Coming.
The story takes place over a few decades in the life of a man named Okonkwo. He marries, has children, works his farm, celebrates, participates in local government. He's basically a normal guy. Okonkwo might as be be called Smith.
That's essentially the plot. The customs and names and gods in his village are exotic, but that's all that separates him and us. Achebe writes, "Each of the nine egwugwu represented a village of the clan." This is a city hall meeting, and the egwugwu are the council members.
Reading a synopsis one would justifiably ask, So, what actually happens in the novel? It is not until the end that any sort of real action takes place. White, Christian missionaries come to their village. They're received with grace and naiveté, then things fall apart.
The novel within the novel, though, is that the falcon can no longer hear the falconer.
Okonkwo, like Greene's character, has a psychologically debilitating mental habit: he is afraid of being seen as weak, in his narrow, macho interpretation. This means he can never hug his kids, because hugging is soft. He can never give a compliment, because nice words are for poets, and poets are weaklings, and so forth. This also means he hates his son, who he regards as a dandy and very effeminate.
Okonkwo, like Greene's character, is aware of how his mindset affects his family--he regrets many things privately--but can't seem to make any materially impactful personal changes.
And that's very tragic. Toward the end of the novel we're rooting for Okonkwo to teach the white judges and bounty hunters a lesson. Because he's so macho and tough, Okonkwo is exactly the man who could, and we expect would.
Yet his village has a very specific definition of dishonor--which none of the neighboring villages have. This prevents him from taking the actions he desires, from setting the plan in place that he knows will work. He speaks about the plan, he yells about it, and champions his friends to believe in it. We believe in it, and root for it.
But, sadly, Okonkwo cannot bear being dishonorable, which to him is a weakness, even though had he taken the dishonorable action, so much could have changed. As strong as he was, he was never strong enough to conquer the fear of being seen as weak. He could have been the hero of his village.
He could also have told his son he loved him.
We are not beholden to our mistakes. Our past is not our future. Everybody knows this. We all have insight into ourselves. We can tell, perhaps not perfectly, what we need to do. We can, at times, see our patterns. Perhaps somebody has to point them out or tell us we have them, but we can eventually grasp them.
Whether we have the strength to listen to what we know is true to take the necessary internal actions... well, that is a different story. Let's hope it's not a tragedy.