Things Fall Apart from a Sri Lankan Perspective

Abstract

The essay looks at the significance of Things Fall Apart in relation to the postcolonial history of Sri Lanka, its ethnic conflict, and its literary history. It advances the argument that Achebe's text, in the process of foregrounding the village as a constitutive aspect social life, not only recalls a way of life that was destroyed by colonialism and modernity, but also suggests that the village needs to be seen as a foil to the structure of a nation state. Strangely enough, it is a colonial text - Leonard Woolf's The Village in the Jungle that comes close to capturing a similar perspective in Sri Lankan literature. This paper also claims that Achebe's representation of the hero has a particular relevance to the recent history of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.