Sula: 1965 Summary & Analysis

Over time, the black community in the U.S. gains more rights and more money. But there’s still a persistent sense that nothing has really changed: blacks are still second-class citizens and looked down upon by the white establishment. This lack of change is here reflected in Nel herself—she’s still thinking about beautiful boys, just as she did forty years before. More money hasn’t made anything essential change, and in fact she misses the old days.

Even as we come to the close of the novel, it’s just not clear why certain characters do certain things. We might want to think that Nel is going to see Eva out of sympathy and love, but we should also consider Nel’s need to control and rationalize everything: she might just be trying to make sense of the events of her life.

Nel’s life is getting emptier and emptier—she’s losing all connection with her children, or at least believes that she is. It seems that she never gave up on the belief that she could only find true fulfillment with a husband.

Morrison shows the absurd arbitrariness of racial hierarchies in America, as the hills switch from being undesirable land to being highly desirable land—all because of the race of the people living there. In the process of all this, the black people not only have to switch locations, but they also lose their old sense of community. Morrison has been highly ambiguous about how much this “sense of community” is worth—is it a refuge from racism and pain, or is it a way for people to accept tragedy as inevitable, and so avoid having to change anything? Perhaps it’s both.

In the world of Sula, black women are essentially born in cages and die in cages. Although they try to go out and explore the world in between, they’re often returned to small, claustrophobic community spaces, where they don’t have the freedom to be themselves.

Morrison has essentially told the story of Sula as a series of ambiguous, tragic events—Plum’s death, Chicken Little’s death, Hannah’s death, Sula’s betrayal of Nel—and then has shown how these events continue to resonate through people’s lives for years. Chicken Little’s death hasn’t come up in a long time, but it’s clearly been on the characters’ minds for years.

Nel, trying to preserve her own sense of self-righteousness, instinctively blames Sula for Chicken Little’s death. Morrison doesn’t bother to correct or verify Eva’s statement about Plum speaking to her from the grave—it’s just one of those vaguely fantastical elements of the novel that could hypothetically be explained, or could truly be something supernatural.

Nel herself only now seems to realize the true source of what she’s been feeling guilty about for all these years. In the moment when Sula let Chicken Little slip from her hands and drown, Nel felt happy—happy that Sula had made a mistake, thereby proving that she, Nel, was the “good” one in their friendship. Nel has always felt distanced from Sula, and now we come to understand the truth: she ended her friendship with Sula not only because of Sula’s affair with Jude, but also because there was always that element of competition and jealousy in the women’s relationship, and Nel never truly felt comfortable with it.

At the close of the novel, Nel changes her view of Eva, in what seems to be yet another tragic misunderstanding of a complex, ambiguous character. Nel seems to be casting Eva as a villain because she can’t stand to face her accusations about Nel’s complicity in Chicken Little’s death, but as usual there is an inexplicable element to Nel’s pessimistic conclusion. It seems more likely that Eva’s fear of watching “the swallowing of her own flesh” was more of the reason for why she killed Plum than for why she didn’t attend Sula’s funeral. It’s assumed that Nel and Eva will never meet again, and so Nel will never reach a better level of understanding for the old woman.

Nel seemingly never forgave or reconciled with Sula before her death, but their strong bond was also never broken—Nel was the only one to arrange the details of Sula’s funeral and go to it. Nel now fears dying alone and unmourned just as Sula was.

We see how far apart Nel and the rest of her community have grown, as Shadrack remembered Sula when he saw her body, but this isn’t the case with Nel. Morrison leaves us with yet another poignant image of misunderstanding and lost connection here.

The tragedy of Nel’s life is that she’s been taught that she needs to find a husband—that she can only be happy if she finds a man and has children. And yet the search for a husband hasn’t brought her any happiness, and has only left her feeling frustrated and purposeless. The only relationship that seemed to bring Nel real happiness—her friendship with Sula—is gone now, thanks to years of betrayal and jealousy. This final scene, however, is a kind of reconciliation for the two—as Sula died thinking of Nel, and Nel finally seems to forgive Sula—but only of the most tenuous and unsatisfying kind. There is no “moral” or “happy ending” to Morrison’s plot, just an account of various tragedies, relationships, and misunderstandings—events circling outward and never truly resolving.