The Main Michael Obi’s Characteristic Essay, Research Paper

According to the short story “Dead Man’s Path” Chinua Achebe shows that the main character, Michael Obi is self-centered. That means Michael Obi is only concerned with his own needs and interests. We see the first piece of evidence of his self centeredness when Michael and his wife are talking about the school and the wives of the other teachers. Not once in the story do we see him caring for his wife’s feelings, instead he present his “modern methods”(1a) to her. We see the second piece of evidence of his self centeredness, when Michael and one of his teachers are talking about the path. Michael sees an old woman from the village. She is using the path to go to the other side. Michael says to the teacher “that you people allowed the villagers to make use of this footpath. It is simply incredible”(1b). The teacher tells him that the path is important to the villagers. Consequently, they have hard time some time ago when they attempted to close it. Michael says “That was sometime ago. But it will not be used now”(1b), which means he decides to close the path. By closing the path, Michael starts to think about the image of the school and himself, because he wants to show to the Government Education officer that he does a good job for the school. The last piece of evidence of his self centeredness, when the Village priest of Ani tries to change Michael’s idea of closing the path. However, Michael says “We cannot allow people to make a highway of our school compound”(1b). He means the path, in the mind of the villagers, closing the path is not right, but in his mind closing the path is ok and he will do it in his way.