Faunal Narratives in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure

Abstract

The (un)friendly relationship between man and other elements of the ecosystem preoccupies people in all domains including literature. This paper seeks to investigate the presentation of the links between human beings and the fauna in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The research question that guides the work is: how do Chinua Achebe and Thomas Hardy project man’s relationship with the fauna? The hypothesis is based on the premise that both authors highlight instances in which man harms as well as others in which he protects animals. Using Zoocriticism and the Comparative Approach, the work concludes that Achebe and Hardy showcase multidimensional degrees of interaction between man and animals with the aim of promoting more peaceful co-existence between them; though they did so in different manners owning to their varying cultural backgrounds. Thus, ecological discourses should take into account the contexts as different spatio-temporal entities project different environmental realities.

Keywords: Environment, Fiction, Zoocriticism, Comparative Analysis, Vision