Sula

            In the first pages of Sula Morrison uses the summary narrative to give the reader a general background where the story will take place.  From there, however, she uses the multiple selective omniscient style.  This allows the reader the ability to see the characters more intimately.  Morrison uses their words, their reactions to their surroundings, and their thoughts to give the reader a greater sense that he or she can know why the character behaves in a certain way.  Thus she allows the place, time and character to dominate the story, rather than the narrator.

            At the same time she in able to give a general idea of what the town, or the inhabitants of the Bottom, as a society, feels.   Thus when she writes such lines as,  “...most of the people...still dreaded the way a relatively trivial phenomenon could become sovereign in their lives and bend their minds to its will” (Morrison, 89), the reader begins to understand the people of the Bottom.  As I read I began to see the losses they felt in their lives.  The losses were both of opportunities never taken, and opportunities never given.

            I do not get the impression that it is the narrator relaying to the reader his interpretation of  the way the people of the Bottom feel.  Rather Morrison expresses these thoughts in such a way that the reader believes this to be a kind of collective omniscience, where the very thoughts of the society as a whole is expressed in a straightforward manner.

            There is no sense of intrusion by the narrator’s point of view in this story.  Even when it seems that we are not experiencing the actual thoughts of a character, I was able to read the book and maintain the illusion that the writer’s rendering of the character’s reactions and so forth were actually that of the character, and true to his or her personality.  “[I]t’s hard to believe we haven’t known them forever.” (Bryant, 8)

            One of the characteristics of the Bottom society Morrison was able to articulate was the sense of sameness in their lives; from the Deweys, who were completely different but always seen as one, to all the hope that always turned into unfulfilled dreams.  They seemed to have an inability to get beyond their own self-created stereotypes.  This story, as it relates to the people of the Bottom, is, “...about people so paralyzed by the horrors of the past and by the demands of just staying alive that they’re unable to embrace the possibilities of freedom until the moment for it has passed.” (Bryant, 7)  Maybe the reader cannot imagine these people “...surviving outside the tiny community where they carry on their separate lives,” (Bryant, 8) because indeed they cannot as long as they hold to these self-imposed stereotypes.  It was my impression that Morrison used the death of so many people at the tunnel as a way of saying the only way out was either through death, or killing off some of these old paradigms.  They were committing suicide anyway with this kind of mind-set.

            I agree with Patricia McKee when she writes of the novel that the story of the people of the Bottom is, “...a history of missing, a history made by peoples’ knowledge of what they would never become, places they would never hold, things they would never do.” (Modern Fiction Studies, 3) There were hints that these people had a real desire to break out of the mold in which they placed themselves. 

            The story focuses on Sula as the one who at first seems to take the biggest step to break out of this mold.   But Sula too had created her own stereotype.  The people of the Bottom thought Sula to be wicked and immoral.  She used this, and her mother’s remark that she loved Sula, but did not like her, as the excuse to live the way she chose to live.  “Sula was distinctly different....and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she live out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her.” (Morrison 118)

            But Sula began to realize she missed something in life.  When she began to have sex with Ajax she began to fall in love with him, or at least have the need to be the sole owner of his affections and attentions.  With these feelings for Ajax she “...began to discover what possession was.  Not love, perhaps, but possession or at least the desire for it.  She was astounded by so new and alien a feeling.”  (Morrison, 131) And when Ajax walked out of her life, Sula began to feel a loss much in the same way Nel felt an emptiness when Jude left her.

             In her more conventional lifestyle and way of thinking, Nel saw sex as not so much as a thing of pleasure, but a moral duty to give herself in that way to her husband.  When Nel lost Jude she felt an emptiness in her thighs.  “Now her thighs were really empty.” (Morrison, 110)  And not only could she not make love to another man, but according to the convention of her society, she could “...never afford to [even] look again” at another man.  (Morrison, 110)

            In her more unconventional lifestyle, Sula saw sex as a means to satisfy her own needs..  “She went to bed with men as frequently as she could.” (Morrison, 122) When Sula lost Ajax, she realized her whole life had been empty.  All of her life she had used love making to satisfy her own needs.  But with Ajax she began to allow her sexuality to be used for another’s benefit.  “Putting her fingers deep into the velvet of his hair, she murmured, ‘Come on.  Lean on me.’” (Morrison, 133) Ironically it was this very act of giving herself to him that chased him away.  After telling him to lean on her, “Ajax blinked.  Then he looked swiftly into her face.  In her words, in her voice, was a sound he knew well.  He...detected the scent of the nest...[and his] eyes dimmed with a mild and momentary regret.” (Morrison, 133) They made love, and he left.  Never to return.  The later realization that she did not even know Ajax’s real name caused her to question the lifestyle she chose.  One day, after Ajax left for good, Sula found his driver’s license and discovered his real name was “A. Jacks.”

            Nel and Sula are like two sides of one Self.  “But while Sula and Nel are represented as two parts of a self, those parts are distinct: they are complimentary, not identical.” (McDowell, 81)  The conventional side and the unconventional side.  Neither ever quite coming together, thus both living their sides to the extreme.  Sula doing everything in her life with the purpose of pleasing herself; even when if flew in the face of conventional morality.  Nel sacrificing everything in her life to give herself in whatever society deemed to be morally acceptable.

            When they both began to realize they’ve wasted their lives by trying to live at these opposite extremes they both sense the emptiness of their lives.  And it is at this point they both begin to die.  Sula experiences literal death, and the society of the Bottom celebrates the fact.  “The death of Sula Peace was the best new folks up in the Bottom had had since the promise of work at the tunnel.”  (Morrison, 150) Nel experiences the death of all those things in her life that caused her to be the lonely, but morally acceptable woman. 

            “All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes.  Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquillity that follows a joyful stimulation.  Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment.”  (Morrison, 170)