Study Guide to
Chinua Achebe's "Dead Men's Path"

During your first reading, be pressing the following curiosities.  Note that they have to do with certain basic choices the author has made in the course of deciding on the story.

(1)  What is the point of narrative point of view here?  What are some facts that can be brought to light from this point of view that would be awkward or impossible to give the reader access to if some other choice were made?

(2)  What strokes of foreshadowing do you notice as you are reading the story for the first time?   

When we experience something as possibly pointing something to come without disclosing what exactly it is, we have a kind of plot device we might call prospective foreshadowing.

After you've finished your first reading, look back and see how many touches Achebe has built into the narrative to be appreciated as foreshadowing, but only retrospectively.  Do you also notice some that you probably were expected to appreciate prospectively as foreshadowing something as yet undefined to come, but did not?

Prospective foreshadowing can of course function as a technique for keeping a reader engaged, to keep reading further.  But in ethically (including religiously or politically) engaged fiction, it is almost always going to serve a larger purpose.  Both kinds of foreshadowing, when all is said and done, point to something.  And this pointing to functions as a kind of emphasis.  In an artfully constructed story, emphasis will not be randomly squandered, but directed to something that is important in terms of the larger reason for being of the story as a whole, its theme.

(3) What are some other key features of Achebe's plotting of this story?

1. What information constitutes the exposition?   
   • How does the narrator contrive to get it in?  
   • Is it divisible into recognizably different sections or phases?  
   • How is all of it important, later on, down the line?  For example:  why is are the details we get about Michael's wife Nancy important?
2. What constitutes the precipitating incident?
3. What is the climactic moment?
4. What are the distinct phases of the rising action, leading up to the climax?
5. What is the denouement, and how (more than one way?) is it important to the overall meaning of the story as a whole?

It's best not to read further in this study guide until you have completed your first reading.  

After you've read and reflected on the story in the light of the above, give some thought to the following issues.  Then read the story again with these agendas of curiosity in mind.  When you're done with that reading, come back to these questions and work through them in a careful and deliberate way.

(3)  What are some issues raised for you by Michael's decisions with respect to his teaching staff?

• What motives are demands on his staff likely to cultivate in them?  (Here we are invited to project ourselves into their shoes.)
• How will this be likely to affect the school in the long run?
• How do his priorities strike you in light of the fact that this is a Christian mission school?
  • What issues might Achebe be pointing at here?

(4) How many ways does the setting (natural and social) in this story relate to the main action of the story?

• Conclude by pointing out how the behavior of the fate of the school garden suggests on the level of the story's theme.
• Note that setting frequently plays a causal and/or conditional role in a story's plot (and that, when this is so, it can be in several distinct respects).  Can you articulate the causal and conditional roles setting plays in this story?

(5)  What offer does the village elder present to Michael Obi in "Dead Men's Path"?  

• What do we make of the elder's proposal?
  • What are exactly are the terms offered?
  • What do we think of the language and manner in which he goes about making it?
  • Is there anything surprising about his approach, given the expectations we might have had about how he might have gone about it?
    • Where did our expectations come from?  Were they, for example, subtly suggested by something in the narrative?  Did we bring them to the story entirely from our side?
  • What is our assessment of the character of the village elder?
• What are we to make of Michael's response to the old man's proposal?
  • Do we find the motivation of Michael's decision here to be simple, or are multiple factors at work?  (Spend some time trying to unravel as much as you can find at work here.)
  • Does the understanding we reach of Michael's motivation affect our sense of his character -- his temperament, the quality of his assumptions, the "kind of man" he is (what makes him tick).  How do we evaluate him?
  • In your view, can the occasion for Michael's decision be insightfully thought of as presenting an opportunity? a temptation? a trial? more than one of these?  Could you explain how?
  • What factors in Michael's background might help to account for the kind of decision he makes here?
• Do our reflections here start to coalesce around an appreciation of how we may be dealing with a foil here?
  • How would such a foil be working in this case?  Is it set up to throw into relief the distinctive features of the elder?  Or is the elder's character (not role, but kind of personality) being constructed here in order to throw into relief certain features of Michael Obi's character?
  • What thematic issues might Achebe be using this contrast to draw attention to, given the direction in which you take the emphasis here to be flowing?

It's best not to read further in this study guide until you have completed your second reading.  

After you've read and reflected on the story in the light of the above, give some thought to the following issues.  Then read the story again with the following agendas of curiosity in mind.  When you're done with that reading, come back to these questions and work through them in a careful and deliberate way.

(6) You've already considered some of the ways in which the setting plays important causal and conditional roles in this story.  But in addition to functioning causally and conditionally with respect to action, elements of setting can also function symbolically.  We have to be careful not to force a symbolic role upon elements of the setting.  But there are indications in this story that Achebe has designed certain features of the story's setting to function symbolically, over and above whatever role they may be discharging in respect of plot.  

• What are the clues that some feature of setting is playing a symbolic role, when it is, as it is in "Dead Men's Path"?
  • Note that in this story there's more than one feature we're invited to take into account this way.  
• Can you put in words what seems to be suggested by way of the symbolic features you are led to settle on?
  • Note for example the meanings that are attached, in immediate context, to the school garden when it is placed in contrast with the details ascribed to the surrounding "bush."  But note that these meanings emerge, in the moment when they do, as shaped by the point of view of Michael and Nancy.  As such, they highlight their assumptions.  The story's outcome invites us to evaluate those assumptions.  Does the foil system, on reflection in light of the story's conclusion, start to develop in an opposite direction?  That is:  do we have a contrast (a foil) between two foil systems (here, ways of looking at the meanings of "garden" and "bush")?
  • Does the title of the story turn out to take on multiple meanings?
    • What is the simple and direct meaning that attaches to it for the villagers?
    • What are the larger meanings it has for the villagers, in virtue of that and of Michael Obi's actions?
    • What are the larger meanings it takes on for us, the readers, in light of the story as a whole?

(7) What are some important ironies you could formulate about the course of action the plot takes in this story?  How about concerning the character (personality) of the protagonist (in terms of the role to which he has been assigned by his superiors)?

   Contents copyright © 2003 by Lyman A. Baker.

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