Sula Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Sula - Essay Example It begins in the year 1919 and proceeds with chapters titled 1920, 1922.1927,1937 and so on to the year 1965. Each chapter represents a particular event around which resolves the past ,present and future significance. The narrative unfolds like a firmly interwoven oral folktale. In this novel the past present and future collapse into a kind of synchronic action. The setting in Sula is an isolated neighborhood called â€Å"The Bottom†, but it is a neighborhood of recent historical past and therefore â€Å"The Bottom and its inhabitants assume, like a narrative itself, a mythological quality. They and their environment are drawn from the rich tradition of black folktale and legend. However the inhabitants of â€Å"the Bottom are not often prey to the extreme seduction of dominant culture. Patrick Bryce Bjorn in the â€Å" The Novels of Tonni Morrison: The search for self and Place within the community says that , instead they are presented as having a world of their own , and thus the delimiting of an external gaze and the valorization of black values and traditions further emphasize Morrison’s singular concern for black life†. Morrison. in all her novels likes to examine the community and its characters. It has become a familiar motif in all her novels. In Sula this motif is played conspicuously in the dialectal tension between communities as monolithic status. The novel has the family of self sustaining black female characters Matriarch, Eva Peace , her daughter Hanna and her granddaughter ,the protagonist of the novel Sula Peace, who combine to provide the oppositional energy to redefine both selfhood and black womanhood. The novel begins with the end to â€Å"The Bottom â€Å"a neighborhood once isolated from and eventually destroyed by white progress in Medallion City, Ohio . A master gave this â€Å"the Bottom to slave and it was considered as a gift given to his master to his former slave. He made them believe that the land is wor thwhile because it is closer to heaven .thus there grows a particular community. But there is a threat from the white that they decided t builds golf course there. The first living being introduced to the reader is Shadreack who returns to the Bottom. He in order to overcome fears of death invents National Suicide Day. He is a representative of who dislike war. Sula the protagonist is friendly with Nel. They are from different family set ups. Nel is from a conventional family. The theme of friendship is treated effectively in this novel. The converging point in the novel is the death of a boy Chicken Little while playing with Sula and Nel. They hide this fact. But guilt conscious arise in the mind is Sula. She considers herself as responsible for the death of the boy, She is suffering from acute feeling that she is an evil character. At the sane time Nel develops a positive attitude to life and she slowly began to move away from Sula. Soon we find that Sula’s mother dies of b urning. When Sula takes a different path of fierce independence and total disregard for social conventions Nel takes the path of a peaceful married life. Sula leaves the bottom for ten more years. During that time she makes affairs with especially white man. When she returns to â€Å"The Bottom† the people considers her as a figure of evil, particularly because of her interracial relations. She even develops relation with Nel’s husband Jude. Jude abandons Nel for that. Later when Sula dies Nel herself blames herself admits her