War and Sula

Sula has easily visible divisions between war and peace, good and evil. At the novel's end, for example, Nel visits "the colored part of the cemetery," which contains tombstones bearing the name/word Peace, Sula's family name. "Together they read like a chant: PEACE 1895-1921… (170-71). Morrison foregrounds a number of ideas in this passage. Peace is the absence of war and, in the context of a cemetery, the absence of life (a person is said to "be at peace" when dead). But the absence of war allows for the manifestation of positive forces of growth and life, and the PEACE on the tombstones here does not signify the end of the lives of the individuals named, but the continuing cycle of life and death, of history and spirit, connected ironically and with great complexity to peace. In addition, the passage encodes an African worldview which sees a continuum, rather than a strict boundary, between the living and the dead. Here and throughout her work, Morrison does not propose a way of dividing up the world, but envisions a complex cultural universe which always already requires dismissal of a dualistic philosophical framework.