Abstract:
Many studies have described Achebe’s Arrow of God as a novel that explores struggle for power and dominance. However, these kinds of explorations, which are mainly literary, have merely discussed the dimensions of power struggles in the text without situating the discursive expressions involved in their immediate and wider contexts for a critical pragmatic consideration. There is need to situate the discursive expressions of power struggles in the text in their immediate and wider contexts for a critical pragmatic analysis. This will not only offer a better understanding of the instantiations of the discourses of power relations and struggles in the novel, it will also provide a sound basis for the appreciation of the theme of power and dominance in the text. Data for the study are purposively sampled extracts of discursive expressions of power and dominance in the novel, which were anchored on critical pragmatic framework that incorporates Norman Fairclough’s approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This is done because the critical pragmatic framework propounded by Mey (2001) relies heavily on CDA for analysis. It was observed that power and dominance were instantiated in the text through discursive practices.
