Foreign Gods Inc. Chapter Summary

Dreaming is Nice, Until You Wake Up
The novel Foreign Gods, Inc., by Okey Ndibe tells a story of a man, Ike, who harbors many idealistic aspirations for his life, but faces the obstacles of reality that force him to lead a life different than his expectations; however, he falls into the trap of chasing increasingly unrealistic dreams, which leaves him worse off than ever before. The first example of how reality differs from Ike’s dreams is when the author explains how Ike is forced to work as a cab drive for many years, instead of pursuing his true aspirations with his outstanding college degree, “He’d worked as a driver for thirteen years, ever since graduating from Amherst College, cum laude, in economics” (Ndibe 13). As can be seen, Ike is oddly employed in a job for which he is greatly overqualified. The reader eventually finds out that Ike is forced to resort to this line of work because of his accent, as can be

This results in him planning to ‘steal’ a local deity, Ngene, in his hometown in Nigeria in order to sell to a dealer who sells totems of local deities sourced from around the world. Ike unrealistically sees this as an opportunity to dig himself out of his own hole with much more extra money to go around, as can be seen in one of his fantasies as he is in the act of ‘stealing’ Ngene, “All his bills would be paid off, with lots of cash to spare” (Ndibe 270). As can be seen, he has extremely unrealistic expectations for his future. When Ike finally does manage to get Ngene to the dealer, the result is disappointing. In this excerpt, Ike and the dealer are haggling over the price, “I give you fifteen hundred. Take it or leave it…” (Ndibe 325). Firstly, this amount of money covers only a miniscule fraction of Ike’s extremely large debt, which was mostly contributed to by the expenses of his trip to steal the totem in the first place. In addition, he simply ends up nowhere near his initial unrealistic dreams of having,