The Examination of Narrative Time in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is considered to be the most impressive account of an African culture being affected by European culture. The novel was written to provide an authentic account of African culture and to portray the detrimental effect of the Europeans’ arrival on the invaded lands. Drawing on Gerard Genette’s theory of narrative, we attempted to discover the story/text discrepancies of the novel. Given that Genette mostly concentrated on the level of text, this study would additionally benefit from Seymour Chatman’s theory on narrative. In unearthing the difference of the plotted course of events from their actual route, we gave special attention to the narrative time and its manifestation in the level of text. We particularly answered to this question that how Achebe brings narrative time at his disposal to fulfill his divergent intention in the two parts of the novel. In so doing, Genette’s definition of narrative time, embracing three elements of order, duration, and frequency, as well as Chatman’s definition of the building blocks of story is provided. The researchers, then, magnified the function of narrative time throughout the novel. The result of this study not only demonstrated the want of story in the first part of the novel, but also revealed how Achebe’s different intentions necessitated dissimilar duration and order of presentation of incidents in the two halves of the novel. It should be mentioned that no discrepancy was observed between the level of story and text in terms of frequency