Narrative Technique of Sula Essay

Although Sula is arranged in chronological order, it does not construct a linear story with the causes of each new speckle event intelligibly visible in the front chapter. Instead, Sula uses juxtaposition, the technique through which collages be put together. The effects of a collage on the attestator estimate on un vulgar combinations of pictures, or on unusual arrangements such as overlapping. The pictures of a collage dont fit smoothly together, even they create a unified effect. The pictures of Sulas collage argon separate events or character 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 office of an omniscient narrator one who knows all the characters thoughts and feelings. An omniscient narrator unremarkably puts the reader in the position of someone viewing a conventional portrait or landscape rather than a collage. (In such situat ions, the viewer can perceive the unity of the whole work 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 different point-of-view character, so that a different someones consciousness and experience dominate a particular happening or section. In addition, the narrator sometimes moves beyond the consciousness of iodin, mortal characters, to reveal what groups in the confederacy think and feel. On the rare make when it agrees unanimously, she presents the united communitys view. As in The Bluest Eye and Jazz, the community has such a direct 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 movement during the first half of the twentieth century. Writers of this accompli shment abandoned the unifying, omniscient narrator of earlier belles-lettres to make literature more like life, in which each of us has to make our have sense of the world. Rather than passively receiving a smooth, connected story from an important narrator, the reader is forced to piece together a coherent plot and meaning from more separated pieces ofinformation.Modernists experimented with many literary genres. For example, T. S. Eliot created his influential verse form The Wasteland by juxtaposing quotations from other literary works and songs, interspersed with fragmentary narratives of passkey 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 with come out the direction or help of an omniscient narrator.To figure out the plot, the reader must work through the perceptions of characters who range from a seven-year-old son to a madman. The abrupt, disturbing shifts from one consciousness to another are an mean part of the readers experience. As with all literary techniques, juxtaposition is used to communicate particular themes. In work over, a work that defies our usual definitions of literary genres, Jean Toomer juxtaposed poetry and brief prose sketches. In this way, Cane establishes its thematic contrast of rural black culture in the sulphur 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 routine 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. Almost every chapter shifts the focus from the story of the preceding chapter 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 Plum with kerosene and burns him to death. Although the reader knows that Plum has vex a heroin addict, Evas reasoning is not revealed. When Hannah, naturally assume that Eva doesnt know of Plums danger, tells her that Plum is burning, the chapter ends with Evas virtually nonchalant Is? My baby? Burning? (48). Not until midway through the near chapter, 1923, does Hannahs questioning allow the reader to understand Evas motivation. apposition thus heightens the readers sense of incompleteness. 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 of narration, each succeeding chapter would pick up where the break one left off, with the main characters now involved in a different incident, but in some clear way modify by their previous experience. In Sula, however, some characters figure prominently in one chapter and then fade entirely into the background.The first chapter centers on Shadrack, and although he appears twice more and has considerable psychic importance to Sula and symbolical importance to the novel, he is not an important actor again. In connatural fashion, Helene Wright is the controlling presence of the third chapter, 1920, but barely appears in the ride out 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 shadowy presence contribute to the readers feeling of disruption. The choppy narration of Sula expresses one of its major themes, the atomisation of both individuals an d the community.Sula. New York Knopf, 1973. Rpt. New York Penguin, 1982