Sula Journal Topics

Sula: Journal Topics

Choose at least one of these topics to write about. You may write on all four if you choose, or you may follow your own inquiry through the book.

1. Why, at the end of the book, is Nel missing Sula and not Jude? Do you and your friends neglect each other when you are dating or in love? What can you get from friendships that you cannot get from a loving and/or sexual relationship?

2. On page 66 Hannah asks Eva if she ever loved her children. She spends the next few pages saying she did, but defining love in a way that Hannah finds surprising. Was she a good parent? According to Eva, what is a good parent? Do you accept her definition? If not, what is wrong with it?

3. Morrison, like Faulkner, challenges our assumptions about the way communities work. Associations like neighborhoods and families have a different dimension in this book. Pick one that interests you and compare the way the two authors develop them.

4. Morrison states: "...one can never really define good and evil. Sometimes good looks like evil; sometimes evil looks like good--you never really know what it is. It depends on what uses you put it to. Evil is as useful as good is..." Locate specific places in the novel where "good" and "evil" are intertwined; where what might be assumed to be "evil" is explained in terms of "goodness" or vice versa.