A Man of the People, Achebe's fourth novel, embodies a major new feature in his development as a novelist. It is a first person narrative told from the limited point of view of one of the principal participants in the story, and the accounts are given not very long after the final catastrophe. The major personal conflict in the book is between Chief the Honourable M. A. Nanga, M.P., and Odili Samalu, his former pupil. In his capacity as narrator Odili begins his story with a deliberately sarcastic statement about Nanga. This sarcasm sets the tone for the satire which sometimes involves Odili himself…. (p. 143)
[It] is part of the novel's irony that as narrator of the incidents which lead to the political struggle with Nanga and as portrait painter of the man, Odili succeeds in exposing perhaps more of his own character and motivations than his opponent's, for the whole narrative is told from his point of view rather than from Nanga's. The result is that in the train of events we come to know Odili, in this case not as passive narrator but as active participant, through his varying responses to Nanga's personality. It is he who emerges as something of a hero in the novel's final pages. (pp. 143-44)
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