Nel's and Sula's Friendship - Book Report/Review Example

The kind of friendship that Nel and Sula had was an ideal for it is comparable to a relationship between biological sisters. They have played together since their childhood days and they were able to withstand the test of time. A prevalent theme in Sula is the influence of family and friends on the characters. The book focuses on two friends, Sula and Nel, but both have been shaped, and continue to be shaped, by their experiences with their families, particularly their mothers. Their mothers, in turn, have been shaped by their own mothers, in a chain reaction passing through the generations. Nel can be considered as Sula's alter ego in the narrative, and Nel's task is more tedious than Shadrack's. Nel is Sula's childhood confidante she functions very similar to a sister, and her presence is something that Sula in no way necessarily questions. Morrison herself has noted that each character lacks what the other has: "Nel . . . doesn't know about herself. Even at the end, she doesn't know. She's just beginning. . . . Sula, on the other hand, knows all there is to know about herself because she examines herself. . . . But she has trouble making a connection with other people and just feeling that lovely sense of accomplishment of being close in a very strong way" (p.14). There is no question that Sula and Nel complement each other, yet their characters are fundamentally, finally discrete. Sula dies without ever approaching the kind of intimacy of which Nel is capable and, although Nel does eventually gain insight into Sula's world, it is achieved only decades after Sula's death. Furthermore, Morrison has stated that, in Sula, she was "interested . . . in doing a very old, worn-out idea, which was to do something with good and evil, but putting it in different terms" (Morrison p. 12). In traditional terms, of course, Sula is evil and Nel is good. At worst, Sula is unbearable and, at best, unknowable to readers. Conversely, Nel becomes for readers just what she becomes for the Bottom-a reliable, likable, accessible woman. In this way, Nel is the reader's segue to Sula, her importance undeniable and two-fold: she helps draw out the peculiarities of Sula's actions and temperament, and she carries the novel in a way that Sula (because of said actions and temperament) cannot. Ultimately, the real reciprocity between Sula and Nel is the shared responsibility of serving as protagonist. Despite dramatic differences in upbringing, there are similarities that draw Sula and Nel together: "Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula's because he was dead; Nel's because he wasn't), they found in each others' eyes the intimacy they were looking for" (Morrison p. 52). Rather than complete one another, the girls feed one another, peer-parenting in the absence of balanced parenting and local role models. Up until Nel's marriage to Jude-a man who believed that, with Nel, "the two of them together would make one Jude" (Morrison p. 83)-Sula and Nel are kindred spirits. It is upon Sula's return to the Bottom after her ten-year absence that the differences between Sula and Nel are tested and the extent of Sula's otherness made manifest. As an adult, married with three children, Nel is utterly contained by the Bottom's sensibility. Morrison reflects: "Nel knows and believes in all the laws of that community. She is the community. She believes in its values. Sula does not. She does not believe in any of those laws and breaks them all. Or ignores them" (Morrison p. 14). In contrast, Sula's concern is with dominion-that is, "sovereign authority over the self-which, in effect, makes the world her domain" (Morrison p. 138-39). Nel's knowledge and experience is local, parochial, with no frame of reference outside her hometown. Sula's is another matter. The transformative moment in Sula occurs when Nel discovers her husband and Sula, naked and on all fours in the bedroom. The scene is important for two reasons. First, the narrative moves from its usual omniscient voice into the first person, with Nel as the "I." Morrison thus discourages the reader from entering Sula's mind, which is without revelation and without comprehension of Nel's grief. Even a dalliance with her best friend's husband does not assume any real significance for Sula beyond its actual occurrence. Yet as Nel's vulnerability is highlighted, the reader begins to watch and wait for Nel to respond to the changes in her life that Sula and Jude's union has generated. In short, Nel begins to assume responsibility for the narrative, and Sula begins to retreat. Without Nel to stabilize or counteract Sula's real or perceived toxicity, Sula is left to play out for the community and, by extension, the reader, the only available narrative she has (and the one that the town has provided): the evil woman. More importantly, though, this scene is the first strain or tear in the narrative fabric, a climax that exposes the glaring limitations of Sula's status as the novel's focus. Without sympathy herself, Sula cannot elicit sympathy from the reader, so Morrison places her character (and herself) in a difficult position. By this point, the reader sympathizes with Nel, and so in order for the incident to play itself out, for the novel to work, the reader must suspend judgment of Sula and wait to see the outcome of her impact upon the town. Nel, who is on the receiving end of these words, is nearly struck dumb. Sula's soliloquy projects the profundity of Sula's imminent absence and, at the same time, predicts a dual apocalypse: the first, the end of Sula's life (these are close to her last, spoken words), and the second, a time when all kinds of couplings-men and men, men and women, women and women, old and young, animal and object, black and white-are foreseeable and acceptable. That is, Morrison ruefully suggests, the end of the world. And, indeed, the end of the Bottom world is nigh, since it is soon after Sula's death that many of the Bottom folk are drowned in a tunnel (another water- related catastrophe) and, soon after that, that the Bottom itself is leveled to make way for a golf course. Of course, there is no lesson for Sula because her character does not recognize the absolutes of good and evil. Morrison asks the reader to both entertain and resist these absolutes, as well, in order to sustain the narrative, which examines the ways in which right and wrong are socially construed. Sula's early death-like her prophetic musings and post-death utterances-makes this point, rather conspicuously. In the simplest of terms, then, the ending of Sula completes the parable that Morrison's prelude began. Through Sula and Nel, respectively, Morrison narrates the good side of bad and the bad side of good. Sula lives according to her own design and, for that independence, dies early and alone on the second floor of an empty, run-down house-but as she says, "my lonely is mine" (Morrison p.143). Nel survives, but it is only on the final page of the novel that she begins to understand that it is Sula, and not Jude, who she has been missing for decades. The parable is seemingly complete: One must strive to strike a balance between self-knowledge and narcissism. Nel should have known herself better, Sula should not have known herself quite so well, and the people of the Bottom should have recognized the good that their perception of Sula's evil fostered. For while there can be a Nel without a Sula, it becomes clear that there can be no Sula without a Nel. Ultimately, Sula shows that a novel cannot rely upon a character who, while compelling and experimental, does not really grow. It is Nel who survives in Sula, living on long after her husband and children have departed, long after Sula's death. The keeper of realism, Nel is the character left to finish the business of the story, clean up the narrative strands, have the epiphany at the end of the novel, and be for readers that character who approaches movement, change, and transcendence. Nel emerges as the traditional "old world" hero, because Sula, as Morrison conceives and constructs her, cannot. Sula has returned out to the Bottom out of boredom with the many big cities she traveled through, and because she craves Nel-"the other half of her equation"-and yearns for their girlhood's soulful friendship. Neither Nel nor Sula, however, are girls any longer. Nel is a solid, dependable wife and does what is expected of her. Sula is fluid, spontaneous, and instinctual. On the surface, they seemingly compliment each other and support one another, but Nel senses the atmospheric changes that swept in with Sula even though their friendship seems to bond them as one. Both Nel and Sula are sexual women now, and, like the change in the atmosphere, Sula's birthmark begins to change, acting as a metaphor for Sula's shifting appetites. Nel notices that the birthmark has darkened, and Jude sees the defining feature on Sula's face not as a rose but as a copperhead, or a rattlesnake, both poisonous snakes that recall the serpent in the garden of Eden, which symbolizes sinful behavior. The easy rhythm of these three characters' lives is about to shatter into discord and chaos. Because the notion of progress is antithetical to Sula's make-up, her character never builds any momentum. We know that we will be surprised, shocked, perhaps, by Sula's choices, but, so knowing, we cease to be surprised or shocked by her. And that is Sula's ultimate paradox. REFERENCES: Badt, Karen Luisa. "The Roots of the Body in Toni Morrison: A Mater of 'Ancient Properties.'" African American Review 29 (1995): 567-77. Bryant, Cedric Gael. "The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrison's Sula." Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990): 731-45. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism-Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985. Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: A Plume Book/New American Library, 1973. Read More