Universality: When Things Fall Apart was first published, Achebe announced that one of his purposes was to present a complex, dynamic society to a Western audience who perceived African society as primitive, simple, and backward.
Unless Africans could tell their side of their story, Achebe believed that the African experience would forever be “mistold, even by such well-meaning authors as Joyce Cary in Mister Johnson.
Cary worked in Nigeria as a colonial administrator and was sympathetic to the Nigerian people.
Yet Achebe feels that Cary, along with other Western writers such as Joseph Conrad, misunderstood Africa.
Many European writers have presented the continent as a dark place inhabited by people with impenetrable, primitive minds, Achebe considers this reductionist portrayal of Africa racist.
He points to Conrad, who wrote against imperialism but reduced Africans to mysterious, animalistic, and exotic “others.”
In an interview published in 1994. Achebe explains that his anger about the inaccurate portrayal of African culture by white colonial writers does not imply that students should not read works by Conrad or Cary.
On the contrary, Achebe urges students to read such works in order to better understand the racism of the colonial era.
Achebe also kept in mind his own Nigerian people as an audience.
Things Fall Apart is viewed as both specific and universal in character because while dealing with a specific character in a specific society at a specific point of time Achebe portrays the very predicament of man.
The novel, thus, transcends the boundaries of a single person or a specific society is applicable to any time and place.
Achebe deals with African society with the intention of ‘correcting the distortions which were deliberately introduced by the Europeans into the history and culture of Ibo people in order to create an inferiority complex in their minds and other Africans.
In this way, Things Fall Apart is a novel about a specific society with the specific aim of restoring their self-confidence.
However, it is partially true since the tells the story of individuals or societies who grow rigid in their outlook with the passage of time and refuse to recognize changes in their circumstances, let alone coming to terms with them.
the Ibo society of the late 19th century but also of any other society at any other time. For example, it is true for our ancient Indian society or Chinese and Greek or Egyptian civilisations.
Thus the novel is about the human predicament itself and is universal in appet is not that Achube is unaware of this dimension of his novel or that this universal element has crept into the text unintentionally.
We may recall that Achebe chose the title of the novel from a poem the second coming by W. B. Yeats talks about the cyclic movement of history in terms of order and anarchy.
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