An Analysis Of The Literary Representation Of The Causes And Effects Of Family Disintegration In Memory Chirere’s Selected Short Stories From The Anthrology Somewhere In This Country

ABSTRACT

The thesis explores the literary representation of the causes and effects of family disintegration in Memory Chirere’s selected short stories namely “Keresenzia”, “Beautiful children”, “An Old Man, Eyes of a Buck”, “Plastic and Cardboards” and “When Passions Gather” from the anthology Somewhere in this country. The literary presentation of the causes and effects of family disintegration is an area which has not been thoroughly explored by African writers. The six short stories were selected using purposive sampling. These have been selected because they present themes and characters which were of interest to the researcher as they express the central concern of family disintegration. A qualitative research was design was adopted to analyse the literary representation of the causes and effects of family disintegration in Memory Chirere’s selected short stories. The six short stories were read and critically examined using family systems theory. As a desktop literary research, there was no field work but a literary analysis. Content analysis was used to analyse the data collected by analyzing and examining the causes and effects of family disintegration as well as its effects on children, parents and the society. An analysis of the short stories was done by identifying themes and characters relating to family disintegration and the findings were presented in narrative form. The study indicated that behavioural problems of the characters, loss of morality, death, cultural fragmentation and poverty are some of the causes of family disintegration as portrayed by Chirere in the selected short stories. The study further noted that family disintegration turns children into vampires and killing machines due to lack of guidance from the family members who are no more. Furthermore, the society has no hope in the future generation because children are growing up with no peer role models. The study concluded that all the selected six short stories “Keresenzia”, “Beautiful children”, “An Old Man, Eyes of a buck”, “Plastic and cardboards” and “When passions gather” provided useful

insights into the causes and effects of family disintegration and the objectives of the study were met. The study therefore recommends that other researchers can also do a study of the causes of family disintegration focusing in the Southern Africa since the beliefs are all African.