Narrative Technique of Sula Essay

Although Sula is arranged in chronological order, it does not construct a linear story with the causes of for for each one wizard new plot event clearly visible in the antecede chapter. Instead, Sula uses juxta countersink, the proficiency through which collages are put together. The effects of a collage on the viewer depend on unusual combinations of pictures, or on unusual arrangements such as lapping. The pictures of a collage siret fit smoothly together, yet they create a matching effect. The pictures of Sulas collage are separate events or portion sketches. Together, they show the friendship of Nel and Sula as part of the many complicated, overlapping relationships that make up the Bottom.Morrison presents the novel from the perspective of an omniscient vote counter hotshot who knows all the contributions thoughts and feelings. An omniscient vote counter usually puts the indorser in the position of someone viewing a conventional portrait or embellish rather than a collage. (In such situations, the viewer can perceive the consent of the whole proceeding with only a glance.) To create the collage-like effect of Sula, the omniscient narrator never reveals the thoughts of all the characters at one time. Instead, from chapter to chapter, she chooses a assorted point-of-view character, so that a different persons consciousness and hold up dominate a particular(a) incident or section. In addition, the narrator sometimes moves beyond the consciousness of single, individual characters, to reveal what groups in the companionship think and feel. On the rare occasions when it agrees unanimously, she presents the united communitys view. As in The Bluest Eye and Jazz, the community has such a submit impact on individuals that it amounts to a character.In narrative technique for Sula, Morrison draws on a specifically modernist usage of juxtaposition. Modernism, discussed in Chapter 3, was the dominant literary gallery during the first half of the t wentieth century. Writers of this period abandoned the unifying, omniscient narrator of earlier literature to make literature more like life, in which each of us has to make our own sense of the world. Rather than passively receiving a smooth, connected story from an authoritative narrator, the reader is forced to plot of ground together a coherent plot and meaning from more apart(p) pieces ofinformation.Modernists experimented with many literary genres. For example, T. S. Eliot created his influential poem The Wasteland by juxtaposing quotations from early(a) literary works and songs, interspersed with fragmentary narratives of original stories. Fiction uses an analogous technique of juxtaposition. Each successive chapter of William Faulkner novel As I Lay Dying, for instance, drops the reader into a different characters consciousness without the direction or help of an omniscient narrator. To figure out the plot, the reader must work through the perceptions of characters who ra nge from a seven-year-old boy to a madman. The abrupt, distressful shifts from one consciousness to an early(a) are an mean part of the readers experience. As with all literary techniques, juxtaposition is used to communicate particular themes. In Cane, a work that defies our usual definitions of literary genres, Jean Toomer place poetry and brief prose sketches. In this way, Cane establishes its thematic contrast of uncouth black tillage in the South and urban black culture of the North.Morrison, who wrote her masters thesis on two modernists, Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, uses juxtaposition as a structuring device in Sula. Though relatively short for a novel, Sula has an unusually large number of chapters, eleven. This division into small pieces creates an intended choppiness, the uncomfortable sense of frequently stopping and starting. The content of the chapters accentuates this choppy rhythm. approximately every chapter shifts the focus from the story of the preceding chap ter by changing the point-of-view character or introducing sudden, shocking events and delaying discussion of the characters motives until later.In 1921, for example, Eva douses her son plumb with kerosene and burns him to death. Although the reader knows that Plum has become a heroin addict, Evas reasoning is not revealed. When Hannah, naturally assuming that Eva doesnt know of Plums danger, tells her that Plum is burning, the chapter ends with Evas almost nonchalant Is? My baby? longing? (48). Not until midway through the next chapter, 1923, does Hannahs questioning spare the reader to understand Evas motivation. Juxtaposition thus heightens the readers sense of in terminatedness. Instead of providing quick resolution, juxtapositionintroduces new and equally disturbing events.Paradoxically, when an occasional chapter does contain a single story apparently complete in itself, it too contributes to the novels overall choppy rhythm. In a novel using a simple, chronological mode o f register, each succeeding chapter would pick up where the last one left off, with the of import characters now involved in a different incident, but in some clear way affected by their previous experience. In Sula, however, some characters figure prominently in one chapter and then draw entirely into the background.The first chapter centers on Shadrack, and although he appears twice more and has great psychic importance to Sula and symbolic importance to the novel, he is not an important actor again. In similar fashion, Helene Wright is the controlling presence of the three chapter, 1920, but barely appears in the rest of the book. These shifts are more unsettling than if Shadrack and Helene were ancestors of the other characters, generations removed, because the reader would then expect them to disappear. Their initial prominence and later dimmed presence contribute to the readers feeling of disruption. The choppy narration of Sula expresses one of its major themes, the fra gmentation of both individuals and the community.Sula. red-hot York Knopf, 1973. Rpt. New York Penguin, 1982