Shmoop - Sula

Sula is the main character of this story, the one who connects all the other characters to each other and the one around whom most of the action is centered. So it makes sense that her name is also the title. And it turns out that her name has several meanings that are pretty appropriate for her character, including "peace" (which is her last name) and "the sun," which kind of makes sense since the earth orbits around the sun, just as so many people orbit around Sula in the novel.
We can ask ourselves a lot of questions about why it's important that Sula gets top billing, though. After all, Nel is pretty central to the story, and some would even argue that she is the protagonist, so why isn't the novel named after her? And since Sula succeeds in making so many people mad, what does the title tell us about who might be the "good" guy and who might be the "bad" guy? At various times we might sympathize with Sula, really like her, or really despise her, so maybe it's this complexity that earns her the title role.

By the end of the novel Sula has died, most of the residents of the Bottom have died, and Nel finds herself alone. When she finally cries for the loss of her friendship with Sula, Nel opens up a lot of questions for us. We learn that her cry has "no bottom and it [has] no top, just circles and circles of sorrow" (1965.73). Does this mean that Nel can't find relief from her sorrow now that Sula is gone? Is she crying because she's angry at herself for not realizing that it was Sula and not Jude that she really missed?
And how does Nel's sadness for Sula change how we see Sula? After all, Nel is probably the one person who is most justified in her anger toward Sula, but she seems to let this go by the end of the novel. Are we supposed to do the same? Nel misses her friend, despite the fact that Sula stole her husband, but in the end, their friendship endures more than any other in the novel.
Maybe the ending challenges us to reconsider what friendship and forgiveness really mean. Maybe it challenges us to reconsider our allegiance to certain characters in the book and our distaste for others. The ending doesn't seem happy in the traditional sense, but Nel finally gets the release she's been needing for years. So while the bottomless cry does seem to open up questions, perhaps it provides a resolution of some sort for Nel.

Morrison doesn't mince words, and she doesn't bury the important messages and events in overinflated, difficult language. While the ideas in the novel aren't simple, Morrison uses simple, meaningful words to articulate them. Let's take a look at the passage when Nel first sees Sula and Jude together:
But they had been down on all fours naked, not touching except their lips right down there on the floor where the tie is pointing to, on all fours like (uh huh, go on, say it) like dogs. (1937.180)
Morrison creates sentences that mirror the way we think. She interrupts a train of thought with a short aside, and she uses the simplest, most descriptive words she can to reflect as faithfully as possible how these characters might respond to a given situation. Her sentences are often short and compact: "Accompanied by a plague of robins, Sula came back to Medallion" (1937.1), and she packs a lot of meaning into them without including anything extraneous.

Although we see a lot of ugliness in the characters, it is spread around fairly evenly. Morrison shows the good and bad in nearly all the major players, and she often follows up the most shocking actions with an explanation of the character's motivation. Take Sula, for example. After she sleeps with Jude, and when we're primed to hate her, Morrison offers us this passage:
Marriage, apparently, had changed all that, but having had no intimate knowledge of marriage, having lived in a house with women who thought all men available, and selected from them with a care only for their tastes, she was ill prepared for the possessiveness of the one person she felt close to. She knew well enough what other women said and felt, or said they felt. But she and Nel had always seen through them. They both knew that those women were not jealous of other women; that they were only afraid of losing their jobs. After their husbands would discover that no uniqueness lay between their legs. (1939.39)
Morrison doesn't make excuses for Sula here, but she does offer us a possible explanation for why she doesn't understand the betrayal Nel feels. So while we might still condemn Sula's actions, Morrison does provide an explanation for them. She doesn't judge acts of adultery, murder, or accidental drowning. She presents them to us and lets us reach our own conclusions.

Sula is told in the third person, and the narrator is able to let us in on the inner thoughts of nearly every character in the novel. Since the story is so character-driven, the third person omniscient narrator grants us important access to the contradictory figures who propel the action. We get to know Helene as much as we do Hannah, Sula as much as we do Nel, Shadrack as much as Eva. This is especially useful in helping readers reserve judgment, since the narrator doesn't seem to judge them either.