A great deal of the tragedy and achievement that is displayed in the work Things Fall Apart is demonstratively representative of the a statement that Achebe is reported to have made, which is recounted in Gikandi's introduction essay in the work. In Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature Gikandi states that Achebe's self professed role as an African writer was "to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement" the work according to Achebe was a, "retrospective attempt to understand the origins of the current crisis- 'to look back and try and find out what went wrong, where the rain began to beat us." (xi)
             This essay will discuss the details of this commitment to Igbo society and culture, made by Achebe, why he felt he had to make it through a very brief literary analysis and through a more extensive analysis of the work itself, discover how successful Achebe is in achieving these goals.
             The development of critical response to Things Fall Apart, like many other forms of culturally specific literature has been relatively slow in achievement. Yet, a more modern perspective that almost exactly mirrors Achebe's own words recanted in the Gikandi essay, seems to be a responsible outlook upon the goal of post-colonial literature, and especially that of Africa. In an foundational work on the subject, Janmohamed offers insight into the grand goals of attempting to translate cultural point of view into English
             The use of the English language and literary forms by African (and other Third World) writers must be understood in the context of a larger social, political, and ideological dialogue between British, and particularly colonialist, literature on the one hand and the ex-colonized writers of the Third World on the other. Faced by the colonialist denigration of his past and present culture and consequently motivate...