60 pages • 2 hours read
Lesley Nneka ArimahWhat It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
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BetaCharacter Analysis
Uche
The narrator and main narrator of “Second Chances” is a woman two years out of graduate school who is burdened by guilt and self-disappointment. She feels bad enough when she must ask her father to help her buy a mattress—something she feels she should be able to do herself—but when her dead mother shows up, the trauma Uche experienced after her mother’s death wells up.
Uche is hard on herself, though from her perspective, she merits it. She admits to being “a child prone to hysterics” (70), including tantrums and overreactions. As a child, she engaged in petty theft, which meant she had to spend much of her childhood in her mother’s salon. She grew out of the tantrums, but she believes she retained a tendency toward self-centeredness—a belief that Uche’s final argument with her mother affirmed, as her mother excoriated her for flipping through TV channels and falling asleep when she was supposed to pick up her sister at the airport. The argument haunts Uche with guilt because her mother’s subsequent deadly accident foreclosed any sort of closure: “The secret of it settled a cloak of guilt on me I will wear for the rest of my life” (76).
That haunting guilt suggests Uche is not an irredeemably selfish person but rather someone with unresolved trauma. In fact, the loss of her mother and her own guilt were so traumatic that they sent Uche into a tailspin that included struggles with substance use disorder. Even eight years later, she has trouble holding a job, often feeling overwhelmed by basic expectations. Her mother’s reappearance further upsets her ability to cope with her emotional wound. Uche seems angry with her mother—angry that she died but also that she seems nonchalant about her return from the dead. Instead of embracing the opportunity to have more time with her mother or using the occasion to apologize and get closure, Uche frantically searches for the photograph she emerged from. She thus misses out on a rare second chance to make things right.
Enebeli Okwara
Enebeli Okwara, the father in “Light,” is one of the few prominent examples of a father figure in this collection. His wife is studying in the United States, making him their daughter’s primary caretaker from the ages of 11 to 14 while his wife. He handles the awkwardness of these adolescent years, and the fact that they “survive” them together even draws father and daughter together. Enebeli prizes this closeness: His wife has her studies and the promise of a better career to sustain her, but Enebeli just has his daughter, without whom he “would shrivel like a parched plant” (58).
Enebeli’s investment in the relationship with his daughter is mildly selfish; he is so focused on what he feels he needs that he fails to consider the long-term stability of the family unit and does little to mediate when there is strife between his wife and daughter. This deepens the rift between Enebeli and his wife, which ultimately works against both him and his daughter when his wife decides to take the girl to the US. Enebeli adores the spark of the girl’s personality, but it is precisely this that life with her mother threatens to extinguish.
In most of the story, Enebeli does not come across as the fiery type. He is mild and somewhat passive—someone “who would be perfectly content sitting by a river, watching the water swirl by” (57). However, faced with the prospect of losing his beloved daughter in more ways than one, a different side emerges: a fighter who uses “vicious words he didn’t know he had in him, as though a part of him knows that his daughter will never be this girl again” (62). He is fighting for his daughter’s happiness, but he loses.
Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili
Glorybetogod, or “Glory” for short, is the main character of “Glory” and an example of an antihero. Traditional heroes exhibit qualities such as moral courage, whereas Glory “[does] a lot of things out of spite, the source of which she couldn’t identify—as if she’d been born resenting the world” (176). Her grandfather believes she has bad chi or was born under an unlucky star, but her resentment of the world could be the source of her trouble as opposed to its symptom. Part of that feeling is implied to arise from the disparity between where she is in life (single and working at a call center) versus her parents’ expectations of her and the privileges she has enjoyed (the means to pay for college and law school).
Glory consistently makes bad choices, such as sticking her hand in a dog’s mouth as a child and partying so much that she was expelled from law school. She is “unlucky, yes, but it was less fate and more her propensity for arguing with professors and storming out of classrooms never to return that saw her almost flunk out of college” (178). She begrudges other people’s happiness and success but doesn’t seem interested in working to achieve them on her own, as shown by her early rudeness to Thomas. On the other hand, the story’s depiction of Thomas as thriving principally due to luck rather than merit raises the question of whether Glory actually could turn her life around: Perhaps her personality is itself a form of luck or destiny.
One quality Glory does possess is the ability to understand herself. This informs her fear of asking Thomas what he sees in her, as she worries that what he admires are just “illusions. A carefree attitude that was simply carelessness. Bluntness mistaken for honesty when she was just mean” (185). This honesty also arises in her disappointment that she can seemingly only make her parents proud and attain financial security by marrying Thomas: She at least has “hope that one day all her missteps would stumble her into accomplishments she could hold up as her own” (198). Like many stories in the collection, Glory’s ends on an ambiguous note, rendering it uncertain whether her qualms about taking the easy road Thomas offers her will amount to anything concrete (or what it would mean for Glory if they do).
Nneoma
Nneoma is the protagonist of “What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky” and a “Mathematician,” The latter identifies her with a privileged group of people she cites as having “luxury that was foreign to the majority of the viewing public” (152). That she doesn’t overtly state the privilege granted her by her profession is significant, as avoidance of difficult emotions—e.g., guilt—is key to her character. For example, when the news breaks that a man following Furcal’s Formula for human flight died, she wonders about where she left her documents but quickly shuts down the train of thought: “[T]hat led to thinking of where she’d moved from, which led to thinking of whom she’d left behind” (151-52). Such recollections are too painful for her because she either feels guilty about leaving her ex-lover, Kioni, or doesn’t feel as guilty as she thinks she should.
Nneoma’s separation from Kioni is at the heart of Nneoma’s character because they broke up over Nneoma’s violation of the rule about not subtracting the grief of a close family member. Kioni called her “a spoiled rich girl who thought her pain was more important than it actually was” (173), but Nneoma does not fully accept her own privilege. She only sees wealthy clients, not refugees. She hides from people who are drawn to her through their grief. She chides a student for criticizing her griefwork because she thinks he’s too privileged to have experienced real pain. Nneoma could be criticizing herself in that instance, as she realizes at the end of the story when she eats all the grief and atrocities that have caused Kioni to experience a break with reality.
