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With real sense of self, she will have a skewed look at the world around her. In her eyes, she is empty, as is the world.
Nel is grounded but this does not mean she is complete. Sula is labeled a wild child because she is not conventional like those around her. She moves to get herself away from Bottom and has several casual affairs with men. When she returns, the townspeople view her as wicked. Those in her town call her a "roach" (112) and "bitch" (112) and her death is a welcome relief. She has an affair with Nel's husband, which makes Nel look like nothing short of an angel in the novel. Sula's life was not nice and neat. Nel married and had children, which was something of a traditional lifestyle for a woman. In short, Nel conforms to what society expects of women. Sula decided not to choose this road. Sula fell into bouts of pessimism at times while Nel was more controlled, albeit she was controlling at times. These women could not have lived lives that were more different from one another and what this shows us is that there must be more to life than what these women had because, in the end, they were not complete individuals. One life was spent living in the shadow of guilt while the other lived behind the veil of denial....
As such, no life can be complete or fulfilling.
Sula and Nel live most of their lives as incomplete individuals because of what happens in their childhood. There is no arguing that we are shaped by our experiences but we do have power over how we allow ourselves to react to events. Sula and Nel were friends and while they grew up and went their separate ways, we see that looks can be deceiving in some cases. It takes death to bring this to fruition in the novel: the death of Chicken Little and the death of Sula for the events at one are revealed at the other. When Nel visits Sula on her deathbed, she is doing so out of a sense of obligation. While she is there, Sula asks Nel if she realizes she was the good one. Nel knows deep down that Sula was the better one because while Sula stood terrified at Chicken Little's death, Nel enjoyed watching the boy die. The two women are incomplete because they do not understand things as they actually are. Sula lived with guilt for most of her life and Nel lived her life rejecting truth. These characters demonstrate how we can live partial lives because one aspect of our past is too difficult to reconsider.
Work Cited
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York:…
Work Cited
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume Books. 1973. Print.
For example, Dorcas' father was killed in East St. Louis during the riots of 1917. He was pulled from a streetcar and beaten to death. Her mother died that same day when her apartment building was torched by protestors. Morrison notes that Dorcas, just a child at the time, went to "two funerals in five days, and never said a word (Morrison, 57)." When Violet seeks out solstice with
It gave her otherwise plain face a broken excitement and blue- blade threat like the keloid scar of the razored man who sometimes played checkers with her grandmother." (52-53) This birthmark is a mark of evil for some critics while others associate it with Sula's sensuality. But the fact remains that such a mark combined with a disturbingly defiant behavior turned Sula into a dark figure, not worthy of reader's
The moment when Sula accidentally kills Chicken Little plays an important role in her relationship with Nel. While both girls are inclined to feel guilt as a result of their involvement in the child's death, Sula believes that her action was caused by her destructive nature and that it is perfectly natural for her to put across immoral behavior. In contrast, Nel gradually detaches herself from the event and
Racist Beauty Ideals and Racial Self-Hatred This paper examines Toni Morrison's novel the Bluest Eye from the perspective of three different interest groups: Those who would interrogate the paper on the basis of issues related to gender, or of the feminist movement; Those whose interests lie in the book's treatment of children's issues or advocacy, and Those engaging in a dialogue centering around issues of race. It should also be understood that these topics
Sethe knew about this future and even as a free woman, she could not escape the anguish associated by belonging to someone else because much of the damage had already been done. Sethe was attempting to overcome the damaging effects of slavery while attempting to adjust as a free woman, even though it was like she was not actually free. Coping with the weight of slavery meant eliminating some
The audience is realized to find that he has been dreaming, but the dread remains for both he father and the son. Early on in genetics was given some effect in diagnosis of schizophrenia: In a classic 1966 paper, Leonard Heston compared foster children who were separated at birth from their schizophrenic biological mothers and foster children who were separated at birth from their psychologically healthy biological mothers. Schizophrenia appeared