'Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer.'Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The "dead" are important to Ben Okri's The Famished Road in many ways. Its narrator Azuro is "Abiku"; the "spirit" son of Yoruba mythology, predestined to an early death and connected to the "spirit world" by persistent and esoteric threads. Unlike the Christian Lazarus with whom his name is associated, Azaro does not undergo bodily resurrection but repeated deaths and rebirths. The cyclical nature of his existence is significant as it allows Okri's narrative to span the "real" and "spiritual" worlds and the transitional space between the two. Thus, the novel establishes an intriguing paradigm of reality in which esoteric existence is granted the same narrative significance as the newly independent Nigeria in which the novel is set. However, the novel is also based on the “dead” in a broader sense. Okri's invocation of Nigerian mythology and folklore paradigms builds an intriguing historicism as the narrative patterns of past generations are regenerated in his writing. This sense of transformation, or as Ato Quason suggests a “mythopoetic discourse”, denotes an interesting interplay between tradition and innovation as indigenous Nigerian culture is reinvented by a “postmodern” text. This interaction is central to the narrative form of The Famished Road. Narration is at the heart of the novel and evokes paradigms of folk tales and orality with its limited first-person perspective and expressions of proverbial wisdom. The opening of the novel is formulaic; provide an invitation to reading characteristic of creationist myths; «In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road, and the road branched out to the whole world. And since the road was once a river, he was always hungry.' (p3) The concept of “Hunger Road” links the novel to Nigerian mythology. As Ato Quayson points out, in southwestern Nigeria prayers are directed to the road “…asking it not to swallow up supplicants during their travels.” This is further reinforced by the road's original origin as a "river", as it forms a parallel with the Yoruba creation myth in which the universe begins in a transitory, watery state as "...the sky, the water and the swamp". Thus, Okri's opening sentence deals with a broader sense of beginning as it both signifies the beginning of the novel and indicates its conscious allusion to earlier modes of storytelling within indigenous culture. The notion of transmission of history across generations remains central to Okri's statement. novel in that the narrative structure is interspersed with oral narration. Towards the end of the third book, the "hunger road" re-emerges as the subject of his father's story. The tale is performed in the dark, ushering in a sensorial shift as Okri's setting is communicated through sound; «The chair creaked. Outside, a dog barked. An owl hooted." (p258) The inability of Okri's characters to see clearly is important; it links the story to the enchanting darkness of dreams and visions and allows the imagination free rein. In particular, the tale adheres to a folkloric paradigm ; encompassing myth and symbol as the insatiable hunger of the road is explained by the reduction of the "King of the Road" to a ravenous and growling "stomach" (261). ends with the proverbial '…This is why there are so many accidents in the world' (p261) Surprisingly, the opening and closing lines of Okri's novel as a whole follow onesimilar scheme. Both its formulaic beginning and the gnomic conclusion that "A dream can be the high point of life" (p500) link the novel to oral modes of storytelling suggests a continuation of the oral tradition as the novel participates in the narrative culture that precedes it . Ato Quayson explores this participation in his 1997 study Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Quayson draws a parallel between Okri's narrative and Joseph Miller's definition of the narrative "cliches" around which oral tales are structured. Thus, for Quayson, the novel constructs a "paradigm of orality in the space of the literary" as the conventions of oral narrative are reinvented within the modern form of the single narrative novel. This notion of double narrative expectation is important as it points to an intriguing sense of historicism within Okri's novel. The symbiosis between indigenous culture traditions and modern writing indicates a move away from a sequential and essentially Western understanding of reality as Okri shows history to be active in the present. This is aided by the glow of Azuro's father's "cigarette" finally illuminating the darkness as the connection between the story and the light of the fire further links the narrative to the conventions of orality. Therefore, Okri builds a sense of timelessness as the glow of a cigarette takes on the role of a communal fire. In this way, Okri positions himself as an inheritor of indigenous Nigerian culture and mythology. However, while The Famished Road participates in the paradigms of orality, it equally draws parallels with a more recent tradition of Nigerian literature; with the revival of folklore paradigms and mythology following the writing of Amos Tutola and Wole Soyinka. Soyinka makes an explicit connection to the symbol of a "hungry" street in "Death in the Dawn". The poem opens with a direct address to the reader; «Traveler, you must leave / At dawn. And dry your feet on the damp dog-nose of the earth.' The concept of origin is important here. As with the opening of The Famished Road, the line is linked to travel and travel, suggesting both the "departure" of the "Traveller" and the beginning of the poem. Because the first-person speech places the reader in the shoes of the "Traveller," the poem seems to suggest a narrative journey, engaging in the journey of writing and being read. Remarkably, the "moisture" of the earth suggests a state of flow similar to that indicated by the "river" at the beginning of Okri's novel. This shared notion of transformation from water to street is intriguing as it evokes a broader sense of cycles. Here, Quayson's notion of a “community culture” seems particularly appropriate since water always returns to a greater source. Quayson describes Okri's concern with cycles of rebirth as influenced by Soyinka's handling of the "Abiku". It is tempting to draw cultural meaning from the clichés shared by the writer, especially when considering the additional parallels connecting Okri with Tutuola. Just as Azuro begins his narrative around the age of seven, in The Palm Wine Drinker, Tutuola's unnamed narrator's life story begins when he is "about seven". Therefore, by connecting to the literature of the past and present, Okri gives weight to the concept of shared culture and the transmission of narrative material. Here TS Eliot's famous statement that "mature poets steal" seems particularly apt. If, as Quayson suggests, Okri is orchestrating a duality between "a paradigm of orality in the space of a literary one," then he is surely participating in the kind of "theft" advocated by Eliot. At the center of thisreading, then, there is the notion of transformation and community within a shared culture: the works of "dead poets and artists" are imbued with new meaning and life. However, the polarities between The Hunger Road and the writings of Tutuola and Soyinka must also be examined. As Derek Wright points out, The Famished Road is far from the "dreamlike folkloric narratives of Amos Tutuola..." as Okri "...does not imagine his world as a mythical, metaphorical or parabolic imaginary construct" but allows for the "real" and "spiritual" worlds have the same narrative status. This view is striking because it highlights Okri's paradigm of reality rather than his commitment to the continuation of indigenous culture. Okri warns us from the start that "one world contains glimpses of others" (p10) and, by integrating the activity of spirits into the prosaic lives of his characters, creates a narrative structure in which the real is a fluid and changing concept rather than a fixed reality concept. This notion is brought to life by Azuro's discovery of a tribal mask in the third book of The Hunger Road. The ease with which Okri shifts from the real to the surreal is astonishing as the frank simplicity of Azuro's narrative allows him to look "from his own eyes" (p244) and move into the realms of myth seeing "a different world" (p245) And yet, what makes this passage so intriguing is the tone of normality created by Okri's syntax. Azuro's remark that "I saw a tiger with silver wings and bull's teeth" contains the same verb usage as "I rested against a tree and closed my eyes" (p244). This creates a strange situation in which the mythological and the prosaic maintain the same syntactic status; a balance composed of the "I" that begins each sentence. The passage therefore has to do with perception; Azaro looks through the mask and accepts the mythological as part of his existence. His acceptance opposes the Enlightenment understanding of reality that Okri wishes to challenge as the sequential and temporal are discarded in favor of the esoteric. However, the passage further connects Okri's writing to indigenous culture. As Iris Andreski illustrates in her study of the life stories of Ibibio women in Old Wives' Tales, the coexistence of esoteric and physical worlds is an accepted norm in much of rural Nigeria. This is made clear in The Reluctant Witch where the narrator tells how "the devil's spirits chased me from home and into a dense forest for a year..." Okri's novel can therefore be seen as a way of seeing that it is not Eurocentric. The narrative displays a fascination with perspective and optics as the action is captured from the incongruous perspective of the Abiku or the "photographer's" camera lens. Thus, the novel functions as a kind of literary mask through which the reader can glimpse "a different world." (p245) However, such a reading must be approached with caution if one is to avoid reconstructing a homogeneous and essentially colonial perception of "Africa" ​​as a continent of myth and esoteric primitivism. The notion of an indigenous, non-sequential view of reality is attractive but denotes a level of otherness; the inability to see things the same way. In his Modernism, Africa and the Myth of the Continents, Jon Hegglund cites Conrad and Picasso as unintentionally active in reducing the “diversity of a continent to a single abstraction.” As their path to “modernist transformation” ran “across Africa,” Hegglund demonstrates that their work simplified its cultural complexity. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay This movement from complexity to concept.