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Toni Morrison's Sula Themes

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Inverted Peace
Throughout the novel Sula, Toni Morrison constantly revisits the theme of inversion. Whether it be regarding the black and white communities or Sula herself, Morrison is able to flip the perception of the parts of the novel that a reader may have thought were concrete. As well as inversion, Morrison creates the theme of life and death, which goes hand in hand with good versus evil. Clearly, the reader can see how death impacts the characters and shapes them to be who they are at the end of their life.
In the beginning of the novel, the Bottom is a black community that is on top of a hill, overlooking a white community in the valley below it. However, as time progresses, the white community will make their way to the top of the hill and the black community to the valley. The geographical locations were inverted to match the economical and social standards. The same goes for …show more content…

We watch it shape each character as well as how they perceive the world. When Chicken Little dies, Sula and Nel are the ones responsible for it, but only Sula feels as if she is the evil one, while Nel feels she is inherently good. From this moment onwards, Sula lives her life according to that experience and that makes her be rebellious and go against the norm of society. The community learns to despise Sula and her actions, so they are relieved and gratified when she finally dies. However, "hard on the heels of the general relief that Sula's death brought a restless irritability took hold," (Morrison 153) and the community was back to lacking affection and care. Everyone thought she brought evil into the world, when in reality she brought peace and positivity. After returning back to the Bottom, it was almost as if Sula flipped a switch to create an orderly and positive community. Therefore, when she died, that switch was flipped right back to the negative and somewhat chaotic ways within the

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