If You Thought Different

Authors Note: This is a piece about how a character in the short story, Dead Man's Path, is a static character. In this piece I explain why the character(Michael Obi) is a static character. I also summarize the story and give my opinion on him.

Dead Men’s Path was about a man named Michael Obi that wanted to modernize things in a school called Ndume Central School. It was a small school in a small country. Michael Obi became the headmaster of school and modernized it to his liking. Though, he did one thing that turned those villagers off. He closed down a path that ran next to the school. The path was sacred to the villagers and was used to contact some of the dead. He, although, thought it was stupid and closed it down. But that was a big mistake. The villagers got angry, stomped on the flowers and even torn down a wall of the school. That was the last thing Michael Obi was accepting. 

 Michael Obi obviously was a static character for many reasons. First of all, he didn’t learn anything from what he did to the people in the village. He didn’t realize  how much he hurt the people in the village. He was oblivious to the fact that the village needed the path for sacred reasons. A quote from story that shows this is “The whole purpose of our school,” he said finally, “is to eradicate just such beliefs as that. Dead men do not require footpaths. The whole idea is just fantastic. Our duty is to teach your children to laugh at such ideas.” This quote shows that Obi was treating this situation like a child, not how a headmaster should be. He thought he was this big guy who could come into any situation and make it great. But he wasn’t.  He just made it worse.

In my opinion, Obi was a very arrogant guy. He didn’t care what the people of the village was used to. If I was him, I would be very embarrassed of my personality. I would be ashamed to be him. I my opinion, I think he would be better off changing his whole view towards thing. Maybe then, he will finally make good decisions.