Criticism on Sula

Despite the name and approach of the novel, Sula consist of three main protagonists: Shadrack, Sula/Nel and the black people who live in the community of Medallion. All three protagonists are bind together to form a center focus (Reddy 3). Reading Sula, readers may apply that the novel is based on only Sula’s actions and her unorthodox behavior she presents. She follows her instant passion unaware of the effect it may have on other people’s feelings.

Sula Peace was brought up in a boarding house of a disturbing separation between mothers and daughters, where she grows to become an uncontrolled woman. The only person who can understand her character is her best friend Nel Wright who then they become “something worse than enemies” (Morrison). The power of love in Sula and Nel’s relationship becomes so forceful that it is evident that these two characters are represented as one. Sula and Nel first met at the swings and sense some type of connection between each other. But only together will their love be functional because they complete each other’s opposite. Sula doesn’t believe that Nel is “the other half” nor another person, but a “second self” (qtd. in Reddy). Sula wants to be Nel and Nel wants to be just like Sula (Reddy). But Sula wishes to be so much like Nel that she has sex with Jude and later describes the condition to fill “this space in front of me, behind me, in my head” (Morrison 144).

In 1927, Nel and Sula both finish school and start their beginnings as women. Before Sula takes off to go to college, she witnesses her best friend get married to a young man called Jude. Sula was very happy for her best friend, but was also losing a piece of herself. Sula’s main focus in leaving Medallion for college was to search for “self by exploring the wider world” (Reddy). On her journey, Sula realizes that every city “held the same people,” and that she could not accomplished the quest to find her personal self (qtd. Morrison 120). Sula never reaches her goal in finding self because she has no way of designing self. Since Nel designed