As a piece of art, the novel evokes a strange but familiar
world. It creates its own fictional world. This world may be
similar but in no way identical with the historical world of
everyday existence. This world is more strange in its
evocateurs, its ability to evoke realities of another world
without losing its own identity. This world is autotelic; it
has its own raison d'etre; its purpose is in itself -- the world
of imagination that is esemplastic, coordinated and integrant.

The world of a novel is apparently the world in which
people live, move and have their existence. The closer to
reality, the more this world assumes the garb of fictionality.
It is the world of the artist, a world that is fabricated from
the artist's imagination. It may be "real" or "ideal" or
naturalistic. But in all instances, it is a world created by
the artist for his own purpose. It is the artist's effort to
imitate divine creation.

The novelist creates an imperfect and fictionalized world
in which people live, move, interact and have their existence.
This world can be sociological without being sociology; it can
be anthropological without being anthropology; and, it can be
historical without being history. Charles Dickens, George
Eliot, Jane Austen and a host of others sought, as Chinua Achebe
is trying to do today, to reveal some aspects of nineteenth
century European society. James Joyce seeks through classicism
and modernism to expose Irish culture. Yet the revelations are
fictional; they are fabricated and concocted; embellished by
verisimilitude.

In the work of the novelist we are immersed into cultural
worlds of people's past and present--worlds adulterated and
alloyed by the subtleties of the artist's world. Achebe's
fictional world is a world that bristles with the complexities
of Igbo culture with its emphasis on individuality, freedom,
republicanism, differences, qualities, spirituality and other
worldliness. It shuns single-mindedness, monolithicism and
outside intrusion much more, domination.

In the world of reality from which Achebe abstracts, the
Igbo culture stresses the worth of every man and every woman.

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