Things Fall Apart 

I find it interesting that Achebe prefaces Things Fall Apart with an excerpt from Yeat's "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot ear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

By beginning with this excerpt, I think Achebe is purposefully setting a tone that the story will end in tragedy. Then as he goes on to describe Okonkwo, the main character, the reader automatically sympathizes with him, despite his non-sympathetic qualities. As a supporter of the Negritude Movement, Achebe directed a tale of African culture to a primarily Western audience. Because many of the traditions of these villages would seem savage to the Western reader, Achebe needed a way to make Okonkwo fully sympathetic as the tragic hero, while staying true to his African reality.

Achebe accomplishes this in small ways. By incorporating the story of how Okonkwo rose above the reputation of his intellectual musician of a father, Achebe relates Okonkwo to the American entrepreneurial spirit. Also, Okonkwo's love for his first wife and her daughter shows his softer side. This gives a more human quality to his fierce front. It is not an easy task to take a complex, hard ass character, and make him sympathetic and tragic. I thought Achebe's execution of creating such a complex character was very well done. I both hated and loved Okonkwo while reading this story. The whole way through the story I found myself thinking how savage Okonkwo was, yet when the Western people came in, I found myself hating them for not understanding Okonkwo's ways. I think this is exactly the reaction that Achebe was hoping for in Western readers; to reach the end of the story and side with the culture that is actually foreign.