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Sula is a powerful, unforgettable compact novel, metaphorically symbolizing a woman who represents our need to find a scapegoat on those who are different.

Sure it sounds like a clichéd theme done over and over again. But for me, it remains a revolutionary work that continues to keep conversations going about race, sexuality, and the actions of communities who are scapegoated and marginalized.

At the crux of this story is Nel the conformist, and her best friend, the eccentric Sula. Sula is a reprieve from Nel’s strict Christian upbringing and separate after high school ends.

Then Sula returns: the jezebel! Stealing Nel’s man, Jude along the way and becomes hated. What becomes of their friendship, you may ask?

The love and hate friendship between Sula and Nel is one of many of the literary canon's feuds- and when one reads this, I identified that they both are inflicted with two kinds of loneliness:

For Sula, loneliness represents a desire to flout convention to free herself from society's conventions, "but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's, made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely" (Morrison 143). For her, it is a choice that she makes in order to make her own way in the world.

Nel's loneliness is self induced, out of her desire to live a rigid and conventional life; and from her anger that her husband Jude left her for Sula, "she had looked at her children and knew in her heart that would be all, that they were all she would ever know of love. But it was a love that, like a pan of syrup kept too long on the stove, had cooked out, leaving only its odor and a hard sweet sludge, impossible to scrape off" (Morrison 165).

But both women also know that their loneliness stems from their childhood secret of watching their friend Chicken Little drown after an afternoon of playing innocently.

It's this wrenching knowledge that they saw a life end is what has brought these women together, yet, apart- Sula is full of self awareness and emotion; Nel, rigid and unforgiving and refuses to take responsibility for her part in Chicken Little's death.

Morrison's novel contains two powerful subplots concerning two men that Sula knew:

Ajax is sexy and refuses to be tied down, and seems to have believe that Sula's his match, only when she asks of his whereabouts does he break up with her, "his absence was everywhere, stinging everything" (Morrison 134). Sula's heartbreak is perfectly captured, "I wanted to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he was making love to a woman who didn't even know his name" (Morrison 134).

Shadrack is the mentally unstable, and PTSD ridden World War I veteran who grieves Sula's death because she's the only one who ever cared for him, and he is the only one who truly understood her, "when he looked at her face, he had also seen the skull beneath...he tried to think of something to say to comfort Sula, something to stop the hurt from spilling out of her eyes, so he had said always, so she would not be afraid of the change" (Morrison 157).

Being an outsider, he becomes accepted at the Bottom for his eccentricities- yet, because he is a man, his actions are never questioned.

Morrison's language, structure, the voices of women all reverberate like ghosts hanging on wanting their stories to be read and passed on, not just Sula and Nel; but of Sula's grandmother, Eva; her mother Hannah, and even Nel's mother Helene are all aching and yearning to be loved.

It seems through her luscious prose, Morrison captures a neverending heartbreak that keeps repeating itself in different stages of life because like unlike Sula, as people, we are always searching ways to "define ourselves" (Morrison 95).

We hurt those that we don’t understand, and often realize that this is an innate desire to appear self righteous.

Postscript: Right after you read Sula, make sure to read Morrison’s masterpiece of a short story called “Recitatif� and the novel “Love�- all three have shared themes that are all interconnected.