A Comparative Study on the Cause of a Curse in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto

Abstract

This study conducts a comparison of two characters that bring the main characters into a terrible fate, the curse, in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Horace Walpole’s the Castle of Otranto. Using New Criticism theory, Miner’s comparative literature and close reading method, the study shows that though both characters in the novels are categorized as brutal leaders, however, Okonkwo is more brutal than Manfred shown in the diagram which has five kinds of crime than Manfred, only one crime. The former heartlessly takes the head of the enemy home and drinks the blood and kills the innocent kid and his family because they are weak people as well as regret for the society change instead of killing the kids and the family, whilst Manfred only kills somebody else and regret for his daughter as the off target. Accordingly, Okonkwo gets the curse more sorrowful by killing himself than Manfred who only mourns for his murdered daughter. The study then is worth a conduct as it has a novelty of the excluded theory in the previous studies and gives the researcher moral lesson that character can determine our future life.