Religion and Doubt in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Albert Camus’s The Stranger

The crisis of faith and the individual's confrontation with meaninglessness are themes that connect the Nigerian postcolonial novel and the French existentialist tradition, and a comparison of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Albert Camus's The Stranger illuminates how very different literary traditions negotiate the collapse of inherited religious and cosmological frameworks. This study examined how Okonkwo's relationship to Igbo religion and Meursault's radical indifference to the moral framework of French colonial society represent parallel crises of meaning in worlds whose certainties are unravelling. A comparative existentialist and postcolonial critical methodology was applied. Both protagonists are condemned to death by systems whose values they cannot fully internalise: Okonkwo by colonial disruption of Igbo cosmology, and Meursault by the French judicial system's insistence on performed grief and moral conformity. The analysis revealed that while Camus constructs Meursault's indifference as a form of philosophical honesty in the face of the absurd, Achebe presents Okonkwo's rigid adherence to traditional values as a form of heroic but ultimately fatal authenticity in the face of colonialism. Both novels, however, share an interest in how systems of belief function as social coercion. The study concludes that this pairing offers productive ground for exploring how colonialism and existentialism intersect in mid-twentieth century global literature and recommends it for courses at universities across all six geopolitical zones of Nigeria.

Keywords: religion, existentialism, Achebe, Camus, postcolonial fiction