The Importance Of Life In Toni Morrison's Sula

In American history the 1920 's was an era unlike any other. During that time there was a drastic change in social life and politics. The nation’s total wealth went skyrocketing up, and for the first time there were more people living in cities than in rural areas. As far as pop culture, there was a new form of music that was introduced, which was jazz, and they had the first ever personal automobiles. The flapper girl culture was also born into this era, women who frequented jazz clubs and vaudeville shows. However, what most people fail to realize is that the new lifestyle during that time was mostly limited to the upper class people, leaving the lower class to live and function in a completely different manner.The books The Great Gatsby …show more content…
Nel spent her childhood in a town that everyone called “The Bottom” in Ohio during the 1920’s in what most people would call a rigid household, so Nel would grow up to do what every other woman did that that time: stay in her hometown, marry a respectable man and raise a family.During her childhood, Nel befriended a girl named Sula.However, after a tragic accident in which chicken little was killed by drowning, the two girls grew apart.Sula was the exact opposite of Nel, as she had great aspirations and a want to escape from her town and go to college and visit other cities in America. Years later, after Sula was already an adult and had fulfilled her wants in life she went back to her hometown, but she was quickly branded as “evil” after having an affair with Nel’s husband, who ended up leaving her. Nel broke off their friendship but just before Sula fell sick and died in the year 1940, they were able to speak and settle what had happened with an irresolute reconciliation. The story ends as Nel goes to visit Eva in a nursing home years later and she is blamed for being apart of the death of chicken little. It was at that point that she realized she was too quick to try to conform to social standards to become a “ good person” and she goes to the cemetery to mourn for Sula at her grave. The people in his story seem to be fixated on conforming to …show more content…
One of the biggest contrasts in these two books are the settings. In The Great Gatsby both Nick and Gatsby live on a “slender riotous island”(page9) called West Egg east of New York where there is Gatsby’s mansion and two other enormous houses. It’s very easy to see that the people on that island had money to be able to pay to live on the island, they were rich. In Sula however, her story takes place in lower Medallion in Ohio. The lower section was called “ The bottom”when the black people lived in that area. The difference between both West Egg and The bottom are made the most obvious when Nel describes a man as she sees him, with “saffron dust floating down his coveralls and bunion split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica”(page 4). After reading the description, the audience has a grasp of the life style that the people in the bottom had, which was the poor man’s life. The most shocking thing about these two realities for the characters in the books was that they take place in the same year, which brings us to one of the similarities between the books: they both took place at around the same time. Even though both were written to take place during the same time period, there were major differences. There was Gatsby, who was filthy rich and able to throw a party every weekend and people like the man in Sula with worn down