Describe the characters and setting of your problem.
The characters involved with my problem deal with a couple groups of people. The main character is the corporation, and I am going to group all corporations together as one for the sake of my argument. These corporations are the figure-head for money in our society, and all the people involved with them are usually people who lust after large amounts of money, and forget about the morality of being human. They are the main character, but another character is the people who get screwed by them, the poor and more underdeveloped cultures. These are the victims. The last character, which is a large one, is the consumer. That is us, and all the middle-class; non third world buyers who continue to fund the corporations.
The setting of my problem is the entire globe, and it generally rests in the field of economics. The problems rest within the banks and stock exchanges of the world, and the earth that we live on. It is also in our minds, that we must buy and we must have things to make us happy. This level of the problem is entirely within our mind, and within society, because it is society that puts it in our mind.
A)Who/what is the monster in Achebe? What brought the monster about?
I believe that the monster in Achebe’s book is the white man. There are horrific things done within the tribes before whites arrive, but at least they are to their own code and culture. The thing that is so monstrous about the white man in this book is that he destroys not only physical people, but a culture as well. He destroys ideas that were completely innovative and original, about how the world works and what we should do about it, and replaces it with his own. The slaughter of a person is one thing, but the killing of what people stand for, destroying their beliefs, is much worse.
The monster came about because of differing ideas. The white man saw these people as uncivilized “savages” and decided to “help” them, or “save” them. They also had natural resources, actually the people themselves were a natural resource, and so to loot and conquer was the main reason the monster was there. The more philosophical reason I believe is that the white man is there to destroy what he does not know. We are naturally afraid of the unknown, and since we have the power to change or kill that unknown, we do it. This part of the world scared whites, and so we took it upon ourselves to get rid of it.
B)After Achebe, what do we make of Rousseau’s “savage.”
I think that Achebe does not confirm Rousseau’s idea of a savage, because his “savages” are not alone. They are in groups, and have a community, and can recognize things. However I think that Achebe’s people are more than the natural man, they have evolved to a certain degree civilization, even if it is different than ours. With this in mind, it is hard to compare the African community in Things Fall Apart to Rousseau’s image of a savage, because I feel that the Africans are almost more of a civilized man than a natural man.
