How are Things Fall Apart and Hamlet either universal and timeless and/or specific to one place and/or time?

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How are Things Fall Apart and Hamlet either universal and timeless and/or specific to one place and/or time?

Things Fall Apart and Hamlet are timeless and universal because they are both tragedies, with both heroes having tragic flaws that eventually contribute to their deaths.

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Things Fall Apart and Hamlet are timeless and universal because they are both tragedies, with both heroes having tragic flaws that eventually contribute to their deaths.

Okonkwo is the tragic hero of Things Fall Apart. He hates his father, Unoka, because Unoka is lazy. In the Umuofian culture, tradition is very important, so Unoka’s laziness is a detriment to Okonkwo’s success. Okonkwo is a warrior, which further proves his manliness and strength. He seems pretty obsessed with proving his masculinity, which makes him come off as a really stoic character.

Hamlet, on the other hand, does not have the tumultuous relationship with his father that Okonkwo has—instead, Hamlet’s father is dead from the very beginning of the play. However, just as Okonkwo’s father serves as a motivating factor in Things Fall Apart, the death of Hamlet’s father is what motivates Hamlet to seek revenge.

The two tragic heroes also fall within very traditional masculine roles of the specific eras and cultures of the plots. In Things Fall Apart, the role of a man is to take titles and make a family. Taking several wives, having several children, and going to war prove strength and vigor for the men in Umuofian society. Okonkwo certainly meets this definition of masculinity.

For Hamlet, he is motivated to kill his uncle Claudius to avenge the death of his father; furthermore, since Claudius has started a relationship with Gertrude, Hamlet feels an even greater need to seek vengeance because Claudius may have corrupted his mother. Both of these motivations follow a very masculine archetypal pattern.

One of the major ways that both Hamlet and Things Fall Apart are timeless is the consideration of a hero that occurs in both of them.  In Hamlet, the prince is a brilliant but indecisive young man tortured by the murder of his father and unable to do more than think hard about it for quite some time.

In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is a fierce and decisive man, never able to contemplate the consequences of his actions when he flies into a rage.  He is tortured by the fact that his father was considered weak and had many debts and was completely useless in a fight.

So they appear to be on somewhat opposite ends of the spectrum, but they both end their lives in a tragic way, both acting as indicators of wrongs both done to them and with their societies and traditions.  As heroes, they appear to be working in very different fashions but in the end they share remarkable similarities.

One other way in which both works might be considered timeless is the fact that they are both addressing cultural and traditional norms that are widely used in questioning both those areas.  In Things Fall Apart it is the traditions of a native culture that seem completely absurd to outsiders and in Hamlet it is a religious world that dooms Hamlet’s father to purgatory because he died “in his sins” while allowing his murderer to rise above that if only he dies after admitting his guilt and pleading for forgiveness.

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