Essay/Term paper: Essay on flowers & shadows

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Critical Essays

4th Essay on Flowers & Shadows

As darkness cloaks the mists of the story line; Sowho, one of the many unprevailling & vengeful victim of Jonan's Crumbling & destructive success, finally makes an appearance at the okwe's residence; leading the fall of Jonan's wealth and power. Sowho's vengeful plot brought him out of the shadows, where his controlled madness might have fooled the likes of Jonan for a while, but the latter's paranoia finally caught on and killed Sowho and itself; putting a rest the destruction and curse laid upon the poor factory workers and opening a broad new scale of possibilities that might (in long terms) help tip the edge of demeaning business ethics in the Nigerian society.
Anyone who read Macbeth would agree that it's quite parallel to Flowers & Shadows. Even thought the books where written by two different authors at different time periods; the depicted morals of the stories show the fundamental and universal relation of corruption to all systems, may it be governmental, sociological etc... Ben Okri and Shakespeare showed that (1) corruption is due to the lack of power on one side of society and too much on the other, or the intrinsic desire of power on the greater side of society, (2) that ones desired limits of wealth and power are relative to ones situation, (3) that one must pay redemption for the evil acts one has commit in the past, and (4) that the cycle of corruption can only be broken with the lack of desire. These points where made quite clear during the book, especially at the end with the loss Jeffia's wealth and his gain of happiness. If Jeffia where to be sad and power hungry, the cycle would have continued but Jeffia is merely a flower blooming in the shadows.