Sula - Reader Response

My initial reaction after reading Sula, was that it was confusing. It wasn’t confusing in the sense that I didn’t understand the plot; I couldn’t figure out what a lot of the meanings were. This is a very different book that has a lot of interesting events and characters. The main themes seem to deal with two things: death and sex. I am hoping that I will further understand this book after more analysis and through class discussion.

I was intrigued by the whole concept of “the Bottom”. It is described as, “the bottom of Heaven” (5), which I thought was an interesting way to describe the town. This place seems to be very preoccupied with death. I found it a little bit uncanny how so many characters were killed in harsh ways. Eva kills her own son, Plum, by dousing him with kerosene and then lighting him on fire, “the smoke of which was in her hair for years” (32). The incident follows her and haunts her as her daughter, Hannah, asks her mother why she killed Plum. After doing so, Hannah lit herself on fire, causing her own death. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of grief coming from these deaths, especially from Sula; Eva was “…convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested” (78). When Sula kills Chicken by accidentally throwing him into the river, there appears to be little remorse. This bothers me because the value of life is almost belittled by the characters. In the book, it claims that “they did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate” (90). This made me notice that there was someone behind everyone’s death except for Sula’s: Eva burned Plum, Sula threw Chicken into the river, and Hannah burned herself only after talking to Eva. No one came to her aid until it was too late, and, as mentioned before, Sula watched her mother burn without doing anything about it.

The character Shadrack is an amusing person that relates to death as well. He invents National Suicide Day in which it was “their only chance to kill themselves or each other” (14). On his supposedly last celebration of Suicide Day, Shadrack was joined by many members of the town. Ironically, most of them were killed in the tunnel that they had dreamed of being able to help create. I am curious as to why they were killed off in such a way. I found myself questioning what the actual purpose of Shadrack’s character is. Besides his National Suicide Day, I think his most important role is where he tells Sula the word, “always” (62). I am unsure of the real meaning of this quote; however I think that it relates to when Nel is describing Hell. Sula had said to her, “Hell ain’t things lasting forever. Hell is change” (108). Later in the book Shadrack thinks about the incident and how it was permanency is what he was trying to assure the little girl of. In that respect, he could have said “always” to tell Sula that Chicken’s death wasn’t going to cause a big change in her life; things were going to be okay.

The Peace women always seemed to want “man love,” yet none of them hold onto a man. For that matter, many of the other women in the book can’t hold onto their men either. It began with Eva constantly having men over. She was married to BoyBoy, but he left after only five years. Hannah, Eva’s daughter, ended up being a woman that the others despised. She seduced many of the other women’s husbands, and, like her mother, had many male visitors. She was against commitment, however. In the book it is described how she only was a lover during the daytime because it was more like “love” when it was at night. In turn, Sula ends up the same way as her mother and grandmother. Not only does she also have many lovers, but she gets involved with her best friend’s husband, Jude. I was wondering why these women seem to need this type of attention so much, yet they don’t want it for the long run. It is evident that for Sula, what she wanted was someone to confide in. This is why Ajax held so much importance to her. All of the Peace women are very independent. I think my favorite quote in the whole book is when Sula is lying in bed talking to Nel and she says: “But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely” (143). Sula didn’t even exactly understand why Nel was so upset by her relations with Jude. She claimed that if they were such good friends, it shouldn’t matter. Sula had never really known what marriage was, exactly, because of the environment she had grown up in.

I am interested to understand many of these meanings more clearly. I thought this book was very unique, but it left me with a bad feeling. I felt sad about everything that had happened in the book and I didn’t feel a good sense of closure.