Sula And Nel's Friendship Analysis

Sula and Nel’s friendship is a central component in the plot and conflict of Sula. Toni Morrison includes a short passage from pages fifty-one to fifty-two to explain the depth of this friendship. Through the use of imagery this passage shows that the girls became close because of their similarities and because the girls found desirable qualities in the others differences. These girls had many similarities on the surface. Both were only children who were described to have “distance mothers and incomprehensible fathers” (Morrison 52) in this section. These girls were very lonely growing up, Nel because she had no one and Sula because there were too many other people around her for her mother or grandmother to pay much attention to her. Sula and Nel could understand one another's struggles as lonely only children and as girls of color in pre-WWII America. They came together as friends on one level because of this understanding and loneliness that they discovered the other could quell. Morrison uses vivid …show more content…
For Sula she grew up in a household of "of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of doors" (Morrison 52). We can envision the chaos and inconsistency Sula had to grow up with that now shapes her as a person. For Nel she grew up “surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s incredibly orderly house” (Morrison 51). Nel grew up somewhere obviously stable and calm which is also reflective of her personality. Morrison points out these details of the girls home environment as a way for us to see into the girl’s personalities. Both these girls are written to be almost direct personifications of their home environment. While they may be nearly polar opposites, it's obvious from the end of the passage on page fifty two that both they girls saw exactly what they were looking for in the other at first