Some history of Sula

This story is about African Americans during the 1920s when they were considered as poor and particularly this book focuses on the lives of African American women. The book enters the story from a guy name Shadrack making a day call the National Suicide Day. Sula is a granddaughter of Eva's and that family is not normal. Eva's family is rich eventhough they are black; however, there is a little mystery about Eva that she is missing one of her leg. Through Eva's family's lives we can see all sorts of weird relationships of people. Mother and child's relationship, friendship, and relationship between lovers, these relationship appears quite awkward to us that it is confusing if its lack of love or possession. so that it could be seen not realistic that the actions are exaggerated and overdone, but on the other hand the emotions in the book is so real that we can feel the characters. Therefore it is not completely magical, actually it is very realistic. Toni Morrison did a great job on showing the mood of depressing era to the audience. As Sula grows, as she gets involved to the society which is the "real world" the changes of her emotion leads us to realize how hard it is to live pure. Toni Morrison really dug our feelings from our bottom and put them into words. It made me want to read other writings of hers.

characters

The characters are developed with such care and brutal honesty that they seem to be plucked from real life and as the author's pen directs the actions of these characters she does not shy away from the darker truths of human nature. This unforgiving style often leaves the reader feeling uncomfortable yet emotionally connected to the towns inhabitants. Their behavior can be hard to accept, whether it be a woman killing her own drug-addict son or a child watching her mother burn to death in silent satisfaction. Nevertheless, by participating in their suffering we not only learn about the character's lives but our own lives as well and what we're all truly capable of.

Lack of Remorse

What can kill a friendship? "Sula" explores this question deeply, following the lives of two very different girls, one who is happy to remain in her home town, marry, and live happily ever; the other who prefers to wander the earth far and wide. When Sula returns to her hometown, she is welcomed openly by her old friend, who painfully realizes that the social norms that she has taken for granted for so long will not be respected by Sula, who has internalized a new, very different set of acceptable behaviors. One example of Sula not carrying about sin is when she said, "I didn't take him from you - it's not like I killed him."

Is there any sin that cannot be forgiven, as long as no "lasting" damage is done? What qualifies as "lasting" damage - is it a physical loss only? What about emotional losses, do they not count because these losses cannot be seen or touched? Certainly, emotional losses can be experienced as deeply as physical ones. "Sula" explores this bewildering idea deeply, emerging with no real answers, but with much food for thought.

Cycles

The novel is a series of cycles and follows a circular structure, opening in 1965, as whites decide they want the Bottom land for golf courses and hilltop views and the blacks who have always lived there move to the valley with its more fertile land. The cyclical nature of life is also borne out in the lives of the characters, especially that of Sula, who escapes Bottom but returns inevitably to the community of her mother and grandmother. Racial segregation, accepted as a given, underlies all facets of the novel, but Morrison focuses on character here, avoiding polemics and creating a novel which manages to be tough but often darkly humorous, emotionally sensitive but often brutal, compassionate but realistic about human nature.

Choices

For me, "Sula" is a book about choices and the problems of living with those choices. It is about loving someone who chooses a very different path in life than we do and what is needed to keep that love alive...or even if it can be kept alive. Sula and Nel are both beautiful characters and both are vibrantly alive. Both want desperately to hold onto their love for each other, but fate and circumstances make it increasingly difficult. The story of Sula's and Nel's growth from child to adult to old age is the thread that ties the other stories in this book into one seamless whole.

Although "Sula" could be seen as an allegory or metaphor for the rediscovery of the core self of black America, I feel the characters, themselves are too rich, to fully-drawn, to alive, to call this book an allegory. Perhaps on some level, it is, but Morrison is a writer of literature, not genre fiction.

All of Toni Morrison's books are masterpieces and all can be read on many levels. "Sula" is no exception. It is a difficult book but one that is both beautiful and tragic and worth every second any reader spends with it. I really can't recommend "Sula," or any other Morrison book, highly enough.

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.

Sula and Friendship

When it comes down to it: Sula is about friendship. This includes what makes us stronger and those things which complicate it. Having secret’s, knows, stealing your best friend's man, getting angry and losing touch – they're all in here.

Most of us have had to deal with friends hurting or disappointing us. While our problems might not have been as monumental as those between Nel and Sula, they may have seemed so at the time. Sula shows the depths of friendship and devotion that two women are capable of, and that's encouraging. It's true that they go through a lot of heartbreak, but each continues to care deeply for the other, overcoming fights and anger and feelings of betrayal.

But it also cautions us about waiting too long to deal with these issues. People move, go off to college, and get new jobs, and we could find ourselves left behind with the same unresolved feelings that Nel has at the end of the novel. Sula comments on the things we all deal with when it comes to the people in our lives; it challenges misconceptions about female friendship and makes us think twice about holding onto anger