Chinua Achebe’s literary texts have no doubt, provided interacting confluences of opinions and comments from both African and non-African critics. Not only from the tributary of literary criticism, scholars from other fields and persuasions, language, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and so on have also enjoyed the fertility of the texts of this writer who was adjudged the greatest prose writer of African extraction. Perhaps, however, no other aspect of Achebe’s writing skill has received greater attention more than his narrative skill, his telling techniques, especially his masterful blend of Igbo and English rhetoric strategies. This paper further examines the language techniques of Achebe in one of his novels, Arrow of God. It examines Achebe’s exploitation of reference in the creation of suspense in the novel. Suspense is a popular literary technique, usually realised as an inter-episodic linking device. But this paper examines it from a different pattern of linking strategy and in this manner uses it to characterise Achebe’s literary idiolect. The theoretical framework adopted in the study is Discourse Analysis, a linguistic theory that examines how the various parts of a text are cohesively united as a whole. In applying this theory in the study, it examines how Achebe’s unique reference patterns help in reading the novel as a text
Keywords: Achebe, Arrow of God, Reference, Suspense, Technique
