ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

AGES ERA PERIOD

RESTORATION AND 18TH CENTURY

Question [CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
In which work do you read: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. “?
A
The Canturbury Tales
B
The Dark Angel
C
The Wild Swans of Coole
D
The Second Coming
Explanation: 

Detailed explanation-1: -Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Achebe uses this opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming, ” from which the title of the novel is taken, as an epigraph to the novel.

Detailed explanation-2: -In Yates interpretation of “the center cannot hold” he describes it as a situation where everything is out of control, a place where you cannot feel safe anymore because the “center” which holds everything together can no longer hold the weight and collapses whereby everything falls apart.

Detailed explanation-3: -Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”

Detailed explanation-4: -Achebe named his book Things Fall Apart which is an allusion to the poem “Second Coming” which is about an end of the world scenario. He used it as an allusion to make a connection between Okonkwo’s life “ending” from his point of view and the second coming end of world scenario of the Christians.

Detailed explanation-5: -"The Second Coming” is one of W.B. Yeats’s most famous poems. Written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I, it describes a deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming-Jesus’s prophesied return to the Earth as a savior announcing the Kingdom of Heaven.

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