The novel, Ordinary People by Judith Guest, takes place in Lake Forest, Illinois, during the 1970s. The story centers on the Jarrett family—Calvin, Beth, and their son Conrad. They are mourning the older Jarrett son, Buck, who was killed in a boating accident. Conrad felt so guilty about Buck’s death that he attempted suicide by…
Category: Literature
No Longer At Ease: Analysis
With great subtlety and economy, No Longer at Ease creates an intricate psychological portrait of a modern African nowhere man. Outwardly, Obi Okonkwo appears a model of success and uplift, a local boy from the bush who rises into the elite to lead a glamorous life in the city with an enviable post in the…
No Longer At Ease: Setting
In the first half of the twentieth century, the empires of Europe controlled most of the African continent. Chinua Achebe depicts the roots of British rule over the Ibo people of the Niger Delta in Things Fall Apart. As colonial administrators were setting up the machinery of government, European industrialists exploited the country’s natural resources,…
No longer At Ease: Themes
Colonialism The social and psychological effects of European colonialism in African life is a central theme in all of Chinua Achebe’s writing. No Longer at Ease is set toward the end of the colonial period; two generations have passed since the white man’s initial disruption of Ibo society, the period depicted in Things Fall Apart….
No Longer At Ease: Characters
Bisi In Chinua Achebe’s novel, Bisi is a girlfriend of Obi’s friend Christopher. She and Christopher go out one Saturday night with Obi and Clara; Bisi wants to go to the movies, but agrees to go out dancing instead. They stay out until two in the morning, and Bisi is reluctant to leave; she says…
Chapter Summaries of No Longer At Ease
Chapter 1 Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease reveals its ending at the beginning: Obi Okonkwo is on trial for accepting a bribe. The trial is the talk of Lagos and the courtroom is crowded. Obi has maintained a demeanor of indifference throughout, but at the judge’s summation tears come to Obi’s eyes. The scene…
Nicholas Nickleby: Analysis
Nicholas Nickleby was Charles Dickens’s third novel, after The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, and it is considered his first classic romantic novel. This latter point is important because Nicholas Nickleby marked an important turning point for Dickens, the definitive fork in the road at which he became a writer of fiction rather than journalism,…
Nicholas Nickleby: Historical Setting
Reform in England Charles Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1838 and 1839, at the end of a turbulent decade in Britain. British workers had fought for an extension of the right to vote early in the decade, but the Reform Act of 1832 in actuality disenfranchised some workers. The Poor Law Amendment Act, passed in…
Nicholas Nickleby: Themes
Class and Privilege Nicholas Nickleby, like most of Charles Dickens’s novels, is explicitly concerned with the human costs of the class system. Nicholas and Kate suffer a tremendous loss of privilege when they lose their father’s fortune and sink from the genteel class status of their birth to a sort of purgatory class of the…
Nicholas Nickleby: Characters
Madeline Bray Nicholas falls in love with Madeline Bray after seeing her at an employment agency. Not knowing her name, Nicholas despairs of ever meeting her until he discovers she is having secret evening meetings with the Brothers Cheeryble. Like Nicholas, she is from the gentler classes but has fallen on hard times and must…