Although Sula is arranged in chronological order. it does non build a additive narrative with the causes of each new secret plan event clearly seeable in the predating chapter. Alternatively. Sula uses “ juxtaposition. ” the technique through which montages are put together. The effects of a montage on the spectator depend on unusual combinations of images. or on unusual agreements such as overlapping. The images of a montage don’t fit swimmingly together. yet they create a incorporate consequence. The “ pictures” of Sula’s montage are separate events or character studies. Together. they show the friendly relationship of Nel and Sula as portion of the many complicated. overlapping relationships that make up the Bottom.
Morrison presents the novel from the position of an all-knowing storyteller — 1 who knows all the characters’ ideas and feelings. An all-knowing storyteller normally puts the reader in the place of person sing a conventional portrayal or landscape instead than a montage. ( In such state of affairss. the spectator can comprehend the integrity of the whole work with merely a glance. ) To make the collage-like consequence of Sula. the all-knowing storyteller ne’er reveals the ideas of all the characters at one clip. Alternatively. from chapter to chapter. she chooses a different point-of-view character. so that a different person’s consciousness and experience dominate a peculiar incident or subdivision. In add-on. the storyteller sometimes moves beyond the consciousness of individual. single characters. to uncover what groups in the community think and feel. On the rare occasions when it agrees nem con. she presents the united community’s position. As in The Bluest Eye and Jazz. the community has such a direct impact on persons that it amounts to a character.
In narrative technique for Sula. Morrison draws on a specifically modernist use of apposition. Modernism. discussed in Chapter 3. was the dominant literary motion during the first half of the 20th century. Writers of this period abandoned the unifying. all-knowing storyteller of earlier literature to do literature more like life. in which each of us has to do our ain sense of the universe. Rather than passively having a smooth. connected narrative from an important storyteller. the reader is forced to patch together a coherent secret plan and significance from more detached pieces of information.
Modernists experimented with many literary genres. For illustration. T. S. Eliot created his influential verse form The Wasteland by juxtaposing citations from other literary plants and vocals. interspersed with fragmental narrations of original narratives. Fiction uses an correspondent technique of apposition. Each consecutive chapter of William Faulkner novel As I Lay Diing. for case. drops the reader into a different character’s consciousness without the way or aid of an all-knowing storyteller.
To calculate out the secret plan. the reader must work through the perceptual experiences of characters who range from a seven-year-old male child to a lunatic. The abrupt. upseting displacements from one consciousness to another are an intended portion of the reader’s experience. As with all literary techniques. apposition is used to pass on peculiar subjects. In Cane. a work that defies our usual definitions of literary genres. Jean Toomer juxtaposed poesy and brief prose studies. In this manner. Cane establishes its thematic contrast of rural black civilization in the South and urban black civilization of the North.
Morrison. who wrote her master’s thesis on two modernists. Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. uses apposition as a structuring device in Sula. Though comparatively short for a novel. Sula has an remarkably big figure of chapters. eleven. This division into little pieces creates an intended roughness. the uncomfortable sense of often halting and get downing. The content of the chapters accentuates this jerky beat. Almost every chapter shifts the focal point from the narrative of the predating chapter by altering the point-of-view character or presenting sudden. flooring events and detaining treatment of the characters’ motivations until subsequently.
In “ 1921. ” for illustration. Eva douses her boy Plum with kerosine and burns him to decease. Although the reader knows that Plum has become a heroin nut. Eva’s logical thinking is non revealed. When Hannah. of course presuming that Eva doesn’t know of Plum’s danger. tells her that Plum is firing. the chapter ends with Eva’s about casual “ Is? My babe? Burning? ” ( 48 ) . Not until halfway through the following chapter. “ 1923. ” does Hannah’s oppugning allow the reader to understand Eva’s motive. Juxtaposition therefore heightens the reader’s sense of rawness. Alternatively of supplying speedy declaration. apposition introduces new and every bit distressing events.
Paradoxically. when an occasional chapter does incorporate a individual narrative seemingly complete in itself. it excessively contributes to the novel’s overall jerky beat. In a novel utilizing a simple. chronological manner of narrative. each wining chapter would pick up where the last one left off. with the chief characters now involved in a different incident. but in some clear manner affected by their old experience. In Sula. nevertheless. some characters figure conspicuously in one chapter and so melt wholly into the background.
The first chapter centres on Shadrack. and although he appears twice more and has considerable psychic importance to Sula and symbolic importance to the novel. he is non an of import histrion once more. In similar manner. Helene Wright is the commanding presence of the 3rd chapter. “ 1920. ” but hardly appears in the remainder of the book. These displacements are more unsettling than if Shadrack and Helene were ascendants of the other characters. coevalss removed. because the reader would so anticipate them to vanish. Their initial prominence and subsequently shady presence contribute to the reader’s feeling of break. The jerky narrative of Sula expresses one of its major subjects. the atomization of both persons and the community.
Sula. New York: Knopf. 1973. Rpt. New York: Penguin. 1982
