Comparative Analysis of Prose
Senior 6 · Literature in English
Comparative Analysis of Prose
Lesson 3 of 5
30 min
Let's begin
The national examination often asks you to compare two set books. This lesson builds a complete comparative essay on two African novels that are frequently set together. Both are in copyright, so the summaries are Ganzaa's own and quotations are kept to a line.
| Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, 1958) | The River Between (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenya, 1965) | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Umuofia, a group of Igbo villages, in the 1890s, as missionaries and colonial government arrive | Two Gikuyu ridges, Kameno and Makuyu, facing each other across the river Honia, in the early colonial period |
| Protagonist | Okonkwo, a famous wrestler and farmer who fears weakness above all | Waiyaki, a young man of Kameno sent to the mission school to learn the newcomers' knowledge, who becomes a teacher |
| Central conflict | Okonkwo against the new religion and government, and against his own fear | Kameno (holding to tradition) against Makuyu (largely Christian, led by the convert Joshua), with Waiyaki trying to unite them through education |
| Key event | Okonkwo's son Nwoye joins the church; later Okonkwo kills a court messenger and takes his own life | Joshua's daughter Muthoni defies her father to undergo the traditional circumcision of girls, which the missionaries have banned, and dies; Waiyaki falls in love with her sister Nyambura |
| Ending | The clan does not rise; Okonkwo is found hanged; a colonial officer plans to mention him in a paragraph | Waiyaki, accused by his rival Kabonyi of betraying the tribe, stands before the people with Nyambura, and the two are handed over to the Kiama, the council, to judge |
Definition
Worked example
A model essay in outline
Question: Compare the ways in which Achebe and Ngũgĩ present the effects of Christianity on traditional communities.
Introduction. Both Things Fall Apart and The River Between show the arrival of Christianity splitting a once-united community, and both follow a proud young man destroyed in the split. Yet where Achebe presents the church as a force that breaks a society from outside and from within, Ngũgĩ presents a division that is already written into the landscape, and a hero who fails not because he resists the new faith but because he tries to reconcile it with the old.
Body paragraph (basis 1: the family as the first casualty). In both novels the new religion first divides a family. In Achebe's novel the church draws in Okonkwo's son Nwoye, who has never recovered from the killing of Ikemefuna and finds in the hymns an answer to a question that had troubled him; his conversion is presented less as betrayal than as escape from his father. Okonkwo's response, to beat his son and then disown him, shows that his fear of weakness has already broken the family before the missionaries take advantage. Ngũgĩ dramatises the same split more violently in the household of Joshua, a convert so strict that his daughter Muthoni must run away to undergo the initiation he has forbidden. Her death in the mission hospital makes her a martyr for both sides at once, and so deepens the hatred between the ridges. Achebe's family split is quiet and psychological; Ngũgĩ's is public and symbolic. Both writers suggest that the church succeeds where traditional families have already failed to listen to their children.
Conclusion. Achebe's elder Obierika sums up the colonisers' method in one image: the white man "has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart". Ngũgĩ's novel asks whether those things can be stitched back together, and answers, through Waiyaki's fate, that a single educated man cannot do it alone. The deciding difference is one of response: Achebe mourns a world destroyed by force; Ngũgĩ examines the harder problem of how a divided people might heal.
The descriptors below are illustrative: they show the qualities examiners commonly reward, not NESA's official marking scheme.
| Quality | A weak answer | A strong answer |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge of the texts | General retelling; some errors | Accurate, precise references to episodes and brief quotations |
| Comparison | Two texts discussed separately | Both texts in every paragraph; likeness and difference weighed |
| Analysis of methods | Talks only about events | Discusses characterisation, structure, symbolism, narration and language |
| Argument | No clear answer to the question | A thesis sustained to the end, with a judgement |
| Expression | Informal, unclear, poorly paragraphed | Formal, precise, well-linked paragraphs |
Tip
Learn ten short quotations per set book. For a copyrighted novel you can only quote briefly, so choose short, rich phrases that serve many questions, and know exactly where in the book each comes from.
Warning
"If One Finger Brought Oil: Things Fall Apart Part 1", Crash Course Literature, presented by John Green. Note what it says about Okonkwo's character and about Achebe's purpose in writing the novel.
Practice
Sources and credits
