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 story continues, imagery of westernization are mentioned; Julius sits at a typewriter, the visitors of this town come only for "trade and money", and our character Ma has converted to Christianity. Although Julius does not hold the same beliefs and superstitions as the area around him, he comes to contemplate his superstitions after stepping on the sacrificial egg and losing things important to him. Could it be that this represents the hazards of not conforming to your surroundings? A sort of punishment for abandoning your cultural beliefs?

Comments

  1. PeterSeptember 3, 2019 at 12:37 PM

    Achebe is a genius, right?! Great post and insights. Fascinated about your proposition that there could be some sort of depiction re: "punishment for abandoning cultural beliefs."

    ReplyDelete

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