Dead Man's Path By: Chinua Achebe

Dead Man's Path by: Chinua Achebe

What Critical approaches are useful for analyzing this story? Why?

This story is about Michael Obi, a young man in his twenties who gets promoted to a new job as the headmaster of a unprogressive school. He is an educated man and has many goals set to improve the conditions of the school. His wife, Nancy, is a very superficial woman that although is decided to support her husband's decision, starts to fantasize from the very beginning of becoming "the queen of the school". I believe that for this story there are 3 useful approaches. First, I would use the psychological criticism. By studying the character of Michael you know that he is a young man, that as the story says, "has fulfilled his hopes much earlier than he had expected". Although he is very educated and prepared he is inexperienced as a headmaster. The story says at the end that he had a misguided zeal, from this we can deduce that even though he was eager to work and wanted a certain form of perfection for his campus he was too strict and inflexible. We can see that he had good intentions and wanted to introduce modern methods to improve the school, but failed to do so because he was unwilling to negotiate and understand. In the end all the things they had achieved in the school (like the beautiful gardens) were destroyed, and the inspection that he had cautiously been preparing for had a terrible report on his campus and his abilities as a headmaster. As a second approach, I think we can use the biographical approach. By reading the short biography of Chinua Achebe at the beginning of the story I learned that he was the son of a missionary teacher and currently a teacher himself. By understanding that he grew up in a teacher's household and has his own experience as a teacher in the present, we can understand why he would choose to write about this topic. Maybe he himself has felt that as a teacher he expects to much perfection or is criticizing the fact that a teacher or in this case a headmaster has to learn to negotiate and understand. For the last approach I chose the reader-response criticism because I think this story can be analyzed from different points of view. Some people may visualize it in a certain way but others can understand a whole different message. The lesson in the story is clear yet can be thought of in different

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