Toni Morrison's Sula (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

Sula isn't the most famous of Toni Morrison's books, but it may be the best. It reveals humanity at its most raw and vulnerable. The only other Morrison book with this kind of power is Beloved, and the less publicized Sula moves with all the passion and compassion of the acknowledged work of genius. Sula and Beloved both belong on any list of greatest books ever written.

In this novel, Toni Morrison's deals in part with the concept of community in a town called the Bottom. Using the Bottom as a microcosm, Morrison introduces us to a series of characters, which although Black, can very well make up any other community regardless of their ethnicity or background. Morrison's ironic style reminds us the Latin American Magic Realism writers from the 1960s, that populated our imaginations with unforgettable towns with fictitious characters very much grounded in reality in order to give us a glimpse at issues of social and economic injustice. The name of the town itself - the Bottom - is an irony: The Bottom is situated at the top of a mountain. It was given to its black founder by his slave-owner master claiming that it was the best piece of land around because it was at the Bottom of Heaven. The white slave owner is the representation of what white colonialism has done for centuries, especially in the American Continent: trading useless trinkets for good land or gold. While Blacks were pushed up to the dry, arid barren lands of the Bottom, the whites settled in the good fertile lands of the valley in the town called Medallion. Morrison shows the segregation of whites and blacks which has been a perpetual issue in the history of the United States. The Bottom could have been a new Liberia. Morrison could have chosen to create a utopia for those who because of racial segregation would bind together and carry out a social experiment. Yet, she chooses to turn it into a microcosms of individuals who, as a community, live their lives on the margins of mainstream white society - outside the mainstream of Medalllion. Like Marquez's Macondo or Rulfo's Comala, the Bottom has its share of self-righteous individuals like Helene Wright and her churchgoing neighbors. These characters are the ones that create and abide by the social rules of the community they live in. But the Bottom also has its share of outcasts. Shadrack and Sula are their maximum exponents. Shadrack is a shell-shocked veteran from World War I that returns to the Bottom and institutes National Suicide Day. The town, at first astonished, allow him to celebrate National Suicide Day with out interfering. Every January 3rd since 1920, Shadrack parades in front of its townspeople celebrating what at the end of the novel becomes a collective holiday. The reaction of the town to this extravagant person is a sample of the people's attitude toward their own lives. At first they are astonished, then they remain impassive, and at the end they join in the celebration. This passivity also determines the character of the town. The inhabitants do not fight back or argue - as if they felt that their futures were already predetermined. In this same fatalistic line, Sula becomes the excuse for the town's setbacks. Sula grew up in the Bottom in a house of women, of independent women. Sula's grandmother Eva and her mother Hannah were comfortable with their own sex

Sula is troubling, powerful, poetic, intense, magical, gorgeous and devastating. Morrison explodes binaries, celebrates "sistergirl" bonds and comments interestingly on the love of mothers for their children and the hardships of African American communities. Sula should be on every high school book list- but usually is blaringly absent from curricula. However, Professors in university are well aware of this novel's force and range and univ. lit programs are likely to include this fantastic, jarring, intensely human work in their curriculum. Sula makes Beloved seem like little more than a simple ghost story. Morrison's craftsmanship here is jaw-droppingly brilliant. Don't read it once, read it several times...every reading will reveal more!!

Having read The Bluest Eye, I felt compelled to read another Toni Morrison book. People have mentioned Morrison's powerful poetic undertones in Sula -- I couldn't wait to read it. This is one of the most powerful and gripping novels I have ever heard. The story follows the path of best friends Sula and Nel. They grow up in a poor black neighborhood with eccentric and suicidal characters. Sula and Nel grow apart. Sula wants to see the world, Nel settles for a married life. Will Sula return to her roots? If so, how will she be received? And will she be able to reconstruct her friendship with Nel?I marvel at Morrison's gorgeous language and quirky symbolism. Her work is thought provoking and realistic. I look forward to reading her other books.

The central themes that Toni Morrison tackles in this work are relevant today and wonderfully executed, although very dark and in rough territory. Friendship, death (of more than the physical kind), a hard life, and little regard for morality comes across in this novel. Her primary characters are women, featuring her as an important writer in any Women's Lit class worth its salt. She holds a mirror, making us, forcing us to look, to reinvaulate American Society, to learn from our past so we do not repeat it in our future. However, younger readers should not be allowed this, because the language is harsh and there is some descriptive sexual scenes. Morrison in detail develops the relationship between Sula and Nel, and show, in this short novel, how each move into different paths and how each must cope with the other's decisions. Sula becomes a seductress whilst Nel becomes a housewife. This woman who so loved Nel she cut off part of her finger to protect her later destroys Nel's family. Sula finds it difficult to stay within proper boundaries, apt to be irresponsible, whereas Nel counteracts her. Morrison also shows the product of the slave mentality: black men who did not feel responsible for their children. She keeps this consistently thruout her works. In the slave nightmarish world, black men did not have to provide for them, because that was the owner's job, and because the white man treated them as stock the black's family structure suffered very extensive damage which that is reflected even today in present society. The men would, when they wanted too, just disappear (Jude and BoyBoy here, Paul D in Beloved). The sins of the men are very great indeed.Shadrack, who you find in the opening section, plays an important part with his National Suicide Day (January 3). Traditionally, water symbolizes life, but in this novel it harkens death, and Shadrack is linked to the water, being a fisherman. One of the central elements Morrison allows us to perceive is the black community's desire to better themselves, and the white community setting them back. The whites give the blacks hills for farmland, saying it is prime farm land. In one central scene, Shadrack, leading people like a pied piper, go down, and try to cross over a bridge unfinished. On the symbolic level, the blacks, want of work, wanted to cross over to the white man's land that the white man had unfairly dominated. Shadrack, although none follow him for years (National Suicide Day deals with Shadrack's disgust of being alive in a society that has a good deal of racial injustices), which culminates, with everyone following him down to the bridge, and he, like the Pied Piper (although Shad has a better cause) watch as death comes upon them. Water is important here in another scene as well, as illustrated in another scene involving Nel and Sula when they are children. Over all, an ugly novel about harsh and bitter things. The situat