Shadrack And Mental Transformation In Sula By Toni Morrison

In the story Sula, Toni Morrison gives the accounts of various characters, and the most complex of them all is Shadrack. Shadrack was born in the years leading to the First World War, and at a tender age, he found himself tossed into the chaos of war. The experiences that he had during the war left him traumatized. What the author called shell-shocked and is known in the modern day mental health care as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. At that time, mental health had not evolved to the point of giving much needed mental care attention to ex-combatants and thus, when he went back to the society, he carried with him most of the mental trauma, and it manifested in his association with people.
Ultimately, Shadrack was not a dangerous person. He …show more content…
This is so since he has had a first-hand experience with war and he was thus, presumed to be dangerous and unstable. Also, his antisocial behaviour, as well as unconventional mannerisms made him stand out from the rest. However, with time, people came to see that he was rather harmless and the level of suspicion reduced allowing them to take part in the national suicide day with him.
This isolation was a rather normal reaction seeing as, in war, someone’s faith in humanity is tested. Someone experiences carnage and death, human being slaughtering each other, extreme brutality and lack of concern for each other. The experiences that Shadrack went through during the war might have caused him to lose interest in human contact since he had lost faith in people. The picture by Clifford Warner shows us the kind of treatment that the soldiers in the war were submitted to by their own officers.
This is a picture of soldiers being inspected for lice by their officers. This shows that the people who were in the camps fighting the war were subjected to the treatment of livestock. They were not able to access good hygiene, and this led to their being inspected for parasites live cattle. Such treatment is sure to affect the relations that one forges with people in the times that come after the war. Such treatment is perhaps what led him to become …show more content…
Throughout the war, the combatants lived in constant fear that they would die suddenly and brutally. Thus, to Shadrack, it was important to let go of this fear by embracing death. By embracing suicide, people do not run away from death, but rather move towards it and seek it out themselves. Suicide is, therefore, not only taking back control over death but also letting go of the fear they had of death and inviting it into their lives.
However, it was extremely ironic further into the ploy of the story where the tunnel collapses as people were marching to commemorate suicide day. The collapsing of the tunnel showed that despite all the effort to embrace death and to attempt to take back control over death, death can still be extremely unpredictable and it can catch us unaware. A lot of people lost their lives at that moment, and it was clear that they were not ready to die as panic rose in the crowd.
During the period when Shadrack was isolated from the community, he got one visitor. She was a girl who wandered into his home. Shadrack is very delighted by this visit, and despite the fact that Sula did not understand what Shadrack was saying to her, it later becomes evident that he was trying to comfort the girl and to assure her of stability. This was very thoughtful of him since Sula is from a seemingly chaotic