Okonkwo Tragic Hero Essay

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A tragic hero is a literature character who’s downfall leads to his/her destruction. Okonkwo lives in Umuofia (a tribe in Africa), where the tribe are being split apart by British Colonialism. He is a tragic hero mainly because he gains sympathy from the audience, although he has accomplished many things, his tragic flaw leads to his downfall.

Okonkwo was a man who was known in many clans, for example when he had “arrived in Mbanta as the proud and imperious emissary of war, he was treated with great honor and respect.” I mean the man was a force to be reckon with, seriously when he was “ a young man, of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing amalinze the cat.”. And with that win he had become one of the “greatest wrestlers of all the nine …show more content…
His downfall is that he did not want to be looked at as soft. It got to the point where “He could not return to the clan for 7 years”. And after those 7 years it had seemed that his unwanting of feeling soft came to bite him in the butt, when he had attacked a man and killed him. When no-one else joined, in attacking he began to scramble to his house. And when the men came to kill him for what he has done “They came to the tree from which Okonkwo’s body was dangling.” That one moment of “Relief” he not only was seen as soft in everyone’s eyes, but he had lost all respect from other people.

So in conclusion Okonkwo can be seen as a tragic hero. Not only because he was well respected by everyone in the beginning. His not wanting to be like his father, not being soft and a push around. In his mind not being soft was the best thing in the world about him, little did he know… that was his downfall. That downfall turned him from respectable,and a model figure into a
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