Why does Achebe in effect give the District Commissioner the last word?

Look at Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” more carefully now: why should Achebe wish to allude to it in his title? What is the Second Coming after all and what does it portend? (And remember that titles can be awfully powerful, as they contribute heavily to every reader’s first impression of a book.) Certainly “things fall apart” for Okonkwo as the novel progresses, but in what other senses does the title phrase apply to the work as a whole? You might note especially interesting echoes of the title and its implications on pp. 131, 176, and 183.
We might say that Okonkwo is an “everyman” figure in the novel; that is, standing at the center of its action and conflicts, his importance as a character transcends his own mere self and body in such a way that he comes to represent more than himself: in some sense, he is his village, his region, his culture, his country, and by presenting his fate to us, Achebe has painted not so much a portrait of one individual but a broad canvas more like a landscape on which profound historical events take place. Why should Achebe choose this man? In what ways is Okonkwo representative of his clan and his time?
And yet it is also true that Okonkwo in many respects is hardly heroic. Given that Achebe, writing in English, was striving for a western audience, why should he make his protagonist (surely a better term than “hero,” in this as in other novels) a person like Okonkwo? Do you find other characters in the novel more attractive than Okonkwo–and why do you find them more to your liking?
How do you react to Okonkwo’s suicide at the novel’s end? Surprise? Acceptance? Anger?
Surely Achebe wishes to provoke us with the suicide–but provoke us to see what? How is Okonkwo’s suicide related to the colonialism we see encroaching on his society in the later stages of the book?
Why does Achebe in effect give the District Commissioner the last word? After all, isn’t he a character introduced only after the action is well advanced? And when it is finished, what do you think the District Commissioner’s book about Africa will be like (paying special attention, of course, to the title the DC has already chosen)? Is Achebe’s book somehow a response to thinking like the District Commissioner displays in the novel’s closing pages? How?

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