Feasts and Fasts: Satiety and Starvation in Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Chinua Achebe's best-known novel has been rarely considered in food-related terms in spite of comprehensive investigations into almost all other aspects of the complex and engaging culture it portrays. This paper seeks to help redress that omission by looking at the way in which literal and metaphorical notions of satiety and starvation offer new insights into Things Fall Apart. By looking at the ways in which the various meanings of satiety and starvation are implicated within each other, it is argued that they accurately replicate the concerns of a novel set in an era momentously poised between continuity and change, in addition to further illuminating the motivations for the behaviour of its characters.