An Author's Intimate Tale

One of the reasons why the novel The Thing Around Your Neck is so powerful is because of the author's close relation to each of the short stories. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche left Nigeria when she was 19 years old to pursue an American education. This novel reminds the reader that the “American Dream” is not perceived realistically. Each of the 12 short stories deals with the extreme difficulty and confusion that Nigerian immigrants face when moving across the world. Adiche falsifies the dreams that many immigrants hope to attain by moving to America. The stories she writes are so incredibly realistic because of the intricacy she works into each storyline and into each of the characters. She makes the reader empathize with the loneliness and sense of insecurity that the characters feel in the story. "Nobody knew where you were, because you told no one. Sometimes you felt invisible" (119). The bluntness of Akunna's depressing thoughts screams hopelessness. Akunna easily accepts the fact that she is alone and isolated from everyone. 
Adiche compels her readers with her superior use of imagery and emotion packed into every line: “It was the summer you watched a mango tree crack into two near-perfect halves during a thunderstorm, when the lightening cut fiery lines through the sky. It was the summer Nonso died” (188-189). When reading this passage I am able to envision exactly what Adiche writes with extreme clarity. The description of the violent storms that filled the summer dramatically sets up the next piece of information Adiche relays on to the reader, which is that Nonso died. Adiche creates a correlation between the violent storms that struck at night in the summer to the trauma of Nonso dying. It is this correlation that brings emotion to the image that she is painting for her reader. 


Adiche is able to portray these emotions because of how close she was to each of these stories. She felt the same loneliness and the extreme lack of familiarity that each of the protagonists felt in the stories. 

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