THE INFLUENCE OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN ELECHI AMADI’S THE CONCUBINE AND THE GREAT PONDS

THE INFLUENCE OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN ELECHI AMADI’S THE CONCUBINE AND THE GREAT PONDS

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a study of the influence of the Supernatural in Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine and The Great Ponds- an x-ray of men and women living in a universe teeming with God, gods, goddesses, spirits, deities, the transcendentals and natural phenomena like sacred animals, birds, hills, and rivers. They all share in the attributes of the supernatural. Unfortunately, man’s vaunted ambition to satiate his quest for the best of everything has always run counter to the dictates of the supernatural, leading as it were, to untold hardships, deaths, and total loss of the gleam. The novels leave us with an enduring lesson that the gods are inscrutable and have a hand in all affairs of the human world.  The study reveals that man’s destiny and affairs or existential struggles is dictated and controlled by the supernatural. Furthermore, the study portrays that man is a pawn in the hands of the supernatural. However, man’s conscious effort to counteract his destiny often result in tragedy as exemplified in the novel under study. The theory of myth was adopted to investigate the influence of the supernatural in the affairs of the characters in the two novels as no other literary theory explains the mystery of life and death.