Title:   NO LONGER AT EASE AND THE THINKING OF LIMITS

Abstract
Chinua Achebe’s works can be deceptive in their classical simplicity. Such is the
case with No Longer at Ease (1960). For critics used to referring the work to what
is thought to stand behind it (which it represents) or to what stands before it,
which it is aiming to correct or give normative direction to, this second novel of
Chinua Achebe is particularly disappointing, apparently lacking what Samuel
Johnson calls a ‘moral purpose’. The power of the text, however, becomes
manifest when the action is analysed as a significant pattern; and the pattern in
question is literary tragedy. In this particular tragic pattern, the character begins
his career, with all certainty about his personal freedom, but goes on to discover
from episode to episode that he is locked in a situation of constraint, and ringed
round by limits he cannot pass over or sidestep. In this paper we shall examine the
narrative in the light of these limits and this constraint.
Keywords: anguish, anguished freedom, boundary situation, deliberation,
lifeworld, tragic constraint, tragic discovery, tragic struggle
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Publication Date: 2022-08-06