Introduktion
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart has been revered ever since it was written for its familiar way of explaining an unknown culture.

However, from a structuralist viewpoint, none of the cultural impacts it has affects its literary value, because structuralism argues that no quality of any novel is more important than the patterns in it that make it part of the literary world.

This argument stems from the fact that all creation – including the written arts – is based on structures built upon myriads of other small structures that create meaning.

In basic terms, in structuralism meaning can only be created by the smaller structures, and the fact that the big structure can be interpreted differently should not obscure the meaning the smaller pieces give to a literary work.

When Things Fall Apart is analyzed for the patterns that give it a structural meaning, it can be seen that Achebe built his novel as pieces of small stories that both follow the traditional plot structure and incorporate similar literary devices.

Utdrag
The literary devices present in the novel are also used in patterns, such as the sentence structures, frame stories in the form of folktales, and word choices.

All sentences in the novel are structured similarly, and it is an uncommon structure for the English language.

This uncommon structure is one of the ways of developing the idea that Umuofians are different from missionaries.

Umuofians do not use typical English grammar while speaking and their speech comes across as a translation, meanwhile the speech patterns of the missionaries include traditional English grammar seen in the Bible such as “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh” (Achebe 156).

While this is another proof of how the two cultures differ, it also serves to emphasize the religious difference of the peoples.

Other than sentence structure, another element that shows the distinctiveness of the Igbo culture is the folktales seen frequently in the text in the form of frame stories.

Those folktales usually include characters from nature, such as “duckling”, “chick”, “mosquito”, “ear”, “tortoise” and “bird”.