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Chapter 15
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in No Longer at Ease, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Corruption
Western Influence and Alienation
Language, Literature, and Communication
Prejudice and Discrimination
Summary
Analysis
Obi stresses over where to get the £30, rejecting the thought of going to a moneylender or crawling back to the Umuofia Progressive Union. At last, he thinks to ask Sam Okoli for the money, a plan that seems to succeed.
Obi retains his pride and ideological convictions but begins to make concessions to reality and recognize his need to borrow money.
Themes
Obi drops off Clara with the doctor, who tells him to return three hours later. Obi waits outside in his car with a bad feeling. After a while, he sees Clara and the doctor leave the clinic together and tries to chase them down and stop the operation, but he loses track of them in the streets.
It's unclear what’s going through Obi’s mind here: he may feel morally conflicted over facilitating Clara’s abortion, but it’s also possible that he may have concerns about sending Clara to a potentially shady doctor and thereby putting her health at risk.
Themes
When Obi returns to the clinic at the appointed time, he’s told he can’t see Clara until tomorrow, as she’s being monitored for complications. He goes home and pulls out Housman’s poems again, this time crumpling the poem called “Nigeria” that he had written and left in the book. The next day, he returns to the clinic, barging past the line and demanding to see Clara. Those in line excoriate him for his entitled behavior. The doctor tells him Clara has been moved to a different hospital, and when Obi goes there, he’s told Clara is very ill and cannot receive visitors.
Obi’s crumpling of his old poem about Nigeria shows him angrily rejecting his idealistic past and, implicitly, the path he has chosen for himself by studying literature and embracing English culture. In this moment of personal crisis, he finds that his literary studies have not given him any resources to deal with his ongoing troubles.
Themes
