ABSTRACT
Oral aesthetics exert a significant influence on this novel's vaguely didactic conception, glimpsed, for example, in the tone and phrasing of the epigraphs to the two parts. The epigraph to Part One reads, "How the city attracts all types and how the unwary must suffer from ignorance of its ways," while the epigraph to Part Two reads, "When all doors are Closed." Yet Ekwensi's didacticism is only on the surface, in a manner reminiscent of Daniel Defoe, with whom he has frequently been compared. For the resolution Ekwensi manipulates the plot to secure a happy ending for the unreformed protagonist by the simple expedient of giving him the rich, adoring, and faintly Europeanized Beatrice the Second for a bride.
