Abstract:
Criticism of Achebe’s novels, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People have either followed a humanistic and sociological orientation whereby the novels are analysed as having correspondences with realities outside the text or formalistic with focus on the structures and no reference to anything outside the texts. The implication of this dual analysis is that the reference and the structure of the works are viewed as being exclusive. This leaves a gap of a type of analysis so integrative as to account for both the reference and structure of the works. To provide such kind of integrated analysis is what is embarked on in this research using Paul Ricoeur’s theory of depth semantics, which uses poetic metaphor as its analytical tool to explain the structure of the work as well as interpret the kind of world the text projects. By hinging the analysis on poetic metaphor, which is an integral element of language, the study was able to prove that through the explanation of the poetic metaphors, the structure of the text can be explained and that by interpreting that which is explained, the possible world of the work can be projected. In this way, the study unveils the fact that it is possible to integrate the analysis of the structure with the reference in totality using depth semantics theory and methodology and that it is possible to analyse the text without drawing inferences from the world outside the text by concentrating on the poetic metaphor of the language.
