Essay Draft Three

Diamond Tang
June 6, 2007
Draft Three
 
     Success Needs More Than Outstanding Abilities
 
Men are born for accomplishments. “A man can be destroyed, but he can never be defeated”, said Earnest Hemingway. So without doubt, everyone has his ambition, no matter big or small. With the goal in our mind, we set out our journey to be somebody. To increase our competitiveness, we have more or less developed some qualities, such as doggedness, or originality. Most people take it for granted that using these qualities can surely help them realize their dreams. However, they may be wrong, or at least, their notion of how to be successful is not adequate. Chinua Achebe somehow supplements their views in “Dead Men’s Path”.
 
In this story, Michael Obi, a new headmaster of a Nigeria School, who is energetic in putting his many wonderful ideas into practice, found his school was backward in many aspects. For example, there is a dead men’s path, which functions as the connection between the village shrine and its place of burial. In Obi’s eyes, this superstitious thing is intolerable since it completely goes against his modern teaching system. He has to eradicate all similar things. After a confrontation with a senior priest on whether the path be closed or not, Obi managed to realize his reform but his opponent destroyed much of the school in retaliation, which was seen as the result of his negligence by the white supervisor. Obi’ failure is not inexplicable. If he really wants to wield his brilliance and innovativeness to be a success, he should have curbed his individual ambition so that it did not go against social customs, which are some unwritten norms or common beliefs shared by the majority of the society.
 
Obi is utterly work-oriented and almost pays no attention to family life, which obviously does not obey our usual emphasis on building a happy, cozy and harmonious family. I cannot help feeling pity for his wife, since she has almost become an accessory of her egocentric husband over the years of their marriage. She had become completely infected by her husband’s passion for modern school. She has no individual emotion, since Obi’s happiness is also her happiness; Obi’s misfortune makes her downcast as well. What is most impressive and ironic is that she “wavered between hope and fear” (53) just because she remembered that all the school faculties are single so she cannot be the queen of the school! This detail tells us that the poor wife has nothing individual; everything of her husband can affect her fragile and dependent emotion. If Obi had not been treating his wife just as something necessary and decorative, should his wife waste her energy and time on such trifle things? Apart from sharing Obi’s enthusiasm, his wife can do nothing, which explicitly shows Obi’s lack of family value, which is one aspect of social customs.
 
What also illustrates Obi’s slack family idea is his awkward logic: the fact that all his colleagues are both young and unmarried is quite good because they will devote all their time and energy to the school. Are work and family two opposing things? According to common social customs, only by boasting a stable family as a strong support can one really exhibit talents in work. Based on this point, we can conclude that Obi is too enterprising and eager to be somebody that he ignores social customs such as family life. Such ignorance turned out to be the source of his waterloo as revealed in the later part of the story.
 
If Obi had only been a typical workaholic, he would not necessarily have his wretched ending. In fact, he made other mistakes in dealing with various kinds of people. “He was outspoken in his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and often less-educated ones.” (52). Since Obi just had some sound secondary school education, he definitely is not eligible enough to show his “denigration of these old and superannuated people” (52) and think they would be better employed as traders in some raucous markets than in the teaching field. It was just because Obi had such narrow views towards other people that he thought their views were narrow! Men are socially born, raised and developed. To know how to appreciate other people and learn from them is undoubtedly a usual social custom. Therefore, Obi’s such attitude towards people around him clearly accounts for his failure.
 
Obi’s words also vividly depict his lack of sophistication when dealing with people. When one of the teachers told him that the path appeared to be very important to the villagers and implied its deep religious meaning, Obi did not catch the hint at all. “A guest must do as his host does”. However, Obi knew nothing but his school. The arrogant headmaster asked, “What has that got to do with the school?" (53). What a dumbfounding question Obi has raised! Even if he did not know the path’s special implication, he should have changed his idea and showed respect to the local people’ own choice of religion. Unfortunately, Obi did not notice the teacher’s accommodating tone or body language “with a shrug of the shoulders” (53), he just arbitrarily ordered that it would not be used from then on.
 
We can already find that Obi is much lacked in social experience and social techniques from this single ridiculous sentence. It is too curt and impolite! How can Obi avert his doom if he did not notice there are tons of hidden yet strong social principles that we must abide by?
 
Of course, Obi’s biggest blunder that leads to his tragedy lies in the field of religion. Once again, it was still caused by his ignorance of the social customs. The whole story reached its climax with the direct confrontation between Obi and the village priest. After the senior priest reiterated the religious importance of the path: “Our dead relatives depart by it and our ancestors visit us by it. But most important, it is the path of children coming in to be born…” (54), Obi even did not have the basic politeness to let the old man to complete his talk! Instead, he smiled with much satisfaction. All these mean that throughout the talking, Obi always held a superior’s position, that is, he never stopped using a patronizing tone. Sarcastically, it gave me the feeling that Obi was the real chief of the village, while the senior priest was only an intruder who begs for some interests. Obi frequently applied this kind of utterly wrong attitude towards the sensitive topic of religion. He said his modern school aimed at “eradicating such beliefs as that.”(54). The thought is totally subverting since he dared to undermine the fundamental base of the local people! Moreover, he did not stop by that; in the presence of the old priest, he mocked that the whole idea about the dead men’s path was just fantastic. He should advocate that his duty is to teach local children to laugh at such ideas! Even after hearing these presumptuous, stabbing and arbitrary words, the senior priest still didn’t give up the last hope, and he used a rather simple yet most compromising sentence, much against to his will: “What you say may be true,” (54) and he gave a big offer that if Obi reopen the path the local people shall have nothing to quarrel about. Nevertheless, Obi didn’t know the gravity of the religious disaster. From his perspective, compared to his school, which is his whole life, the local people’s religion accounts for nothing. Obi did not make even a little concession; he insisted that the school compound could not be a thoroughfare because that was against the school’s regulations. Talking with such a stubborn, naïve and bold young man, the old priest used a last resort: “What I always say is: let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” (54) Chances are Obi thought this sentence did not show much education and disdained it. After all, Obi ended this round of confrontation with stances of a winner. However, what he said and did equals ruining the cultural root, the moral bottom line of the local people. He always thought religion is a kind of thing that is full of narrow ideas and is only practiced by those less-educated ones. But just as the senior priest said, “we follow the practice of our fathers” (54), religion is not something that can be simply labeled “true” or “false”, for it is the cream or crystal of a specific nation, originating from its history, culture and politics. Obi should have noticed that religion is a rather important factor of the social customs.
 
On the whole, the author never let the story to be puzzling. Instead, plots in “Dead Men’s Path” is simply enough for us to accept what the author strived to let us know: Obi has many qualities that a success needs, and he should have been able to make it, if only he had curbed his ambition, not letting it to defy so much social customs, with which Obi goes against in the fields of family value, dealing with other people and the issue of religion. Obi’s tragedy roots from his misunderstanding about how to be successful. Success is not one man’s business. In other words, it needs more than one’s outstanding abilities. It involves the whole society around him, which means that one has to contemplate enough about the people and the whole environment of the society from time to time while he is pursuing his dream. Only by meeting this criterion can one be qualified to be different from others. We have the right to be confident to make the world we live better with our ideas, but we don’t boast the privilege to let our personal dream to go utterly against the more powerful and influential force—the social customs. These things are special because one can’t simply say they are right or wrong. They are sets of unwritten norms that we have to accept and conform with. Or we can say that there are many things including the social customs that we are born to accept. Never try to change it by force, even if you think you are 200% right!
 
“Let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” (54) This pithy and meaningful sentence told us an eternal maxim: the world provides a stage for us to be individuals we want to be, but the stage is not unlimited. Don’t make a scene of yourself by trying to alter every aspects of the bigger world that seem stupid to you, otherwise you would be practicing Obi’s tragedy again, since he thought it is absolutely right for him to defy and change so much social customs. Achebe wrote the fiction to remind us this: We, each as an individual born into this world, have our responsibilities to observe all the rules of the big game of life, no matter they are written or not, manifest or opaque. Never try to change them. The world is always cleverer than you on the whole, not you.  
 
                            
                                     Work Cited
Achebe, Chinua. “Dead Men’s Path.” 1953. Rpt.in The International Story: An Anthology with Guidelines for Reading and Writing about Fiction. Ruth Spack. New Yorks: St.Martin’s, 1994. 6-8. 

30.5.07 09:44