Okri juxtaposes African myths with European realism and postmodernism to expand the human spirit, to critique and decolonize both European and African realism, and to create a dialogue between West African oral traditions and postmodernism. Everyone is superstitious because their perspectives are biased and provisional. B. Okri develops a complex cross-cultural aesthetic form to challenge the narrow, linear ideology of literary realism. Realism's narrow focus erases aesthetic form, cultural difference, and the supernatural. In particular, realism excludes the supernatural.
More imaginative forms help reclaim the full human spirit.
Novelists need to clear a space, which is the essential gesture of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Okri uses myth to open a space for an African folkloric narrative. In particular, he uses mythopoetic description of alternate realities to challenge the ethnocentric limitations of the European novel. Okri shifts immediately and fluidly between myths and realism. This makes Okri's style like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's.