The Sacrificial Egg - Response
As I read Chinua Achebe's short story The Sacrificial Egg , I was amazed by the amount of cultural context and background information Achebe was able to pack into this story without any long-winded exposition or bombarding the reader with facts at the beginning of the story. As a reader unfamiliar with the cultural attitudes of Achebe's setting, I felt like I still understood the implications of this place and it's people through the descriptive and metaphorical language Achebe used. Because culture plays such a big role in this story, the metaphors (and the callbacks to those metaphors) heavily contributed to my enjoyment of the reading. After finishing the story, I got the sense that Achebe's narrative is alluding to the idea of assimilating to another culture and its potential pitfalls. From the beginning of the story, Achebe makes a point to tell us that our main character, Julius, is not native to this area, but he is a native of Africa. As the sto...