'Narrative Technique of Sula Essay\r'

'Although genus genus Sula is arranged in chronological order, it does non construct a bilinear drool with the causes of each new plot burden pretendly visible in the preceding chapter. Instead, Sula uses â€Å"juxta vista,” the technique by which collages are put together. The stamps of a collage on the viewer calculate on fantastic combinations of pictures, or on unusual arrangements such(prenominal) as overlapping. The pictures of a collage turn in’t fit smoothly together, yet they bring out a unified effect. The â€Å"pictures” of Sula’s collage are separate events or character sketches. Together, they come on the friendship of Nel and Sula as part of the some(prenominal) complicated, overlapping relationships that make up the Bottom.\r\nMorrison presents the novel from the linear perspective of an all-knowing narrator †single who knows all the characters’ thoughts and feelings. An omniscient narrator usually puts the con tributor in the position of someone viewing a conventional characterization or landscape rather than a collage. (In such situations, the viewer can perceive the unity of the strong work with only a glance.) To create the collage- corresponding effect of Sula, the omniscient narrator never reveals the thoughts of all the characters at one time. Instead, from chapter to chapter, she chooses a assorted point-of-view character, so that a different person’s cognisance and date dominate a particular incident or section. In addition, the narrator sometimes moves beyond the sense of single, individual characters, to reveal what groups in the confederacy think and feel. On the rare occasions when it agrees unanimously, she presents the united connection’s view. As in The Bluest Eye and Jazz, the community has such a direct impact on individuals that it amounts to a character.\r\nIn narrative technique for Sula, Morrison draws on a specifically modernist usage of colloca tion. Modernism, discussed in Chapter 3, was the dominating literary movement during the first half of the twentieth century. Writers of this period abandoned the unifying, omniscient narrator of former literature to make literature more like life, in which each of us has to make our give birth sense of the world. Rather than passively receiving a smooth, connected story from an authoritative narrator, the lecturer is forced to office together a coherent plot and inwardness from more separated pieces of information.\r\nModernists experimented with many literary genres. For example, T. S. Eliot created his authoritative poem The Wasteland by juxtaposing quotations from new(prenominal) literary works and songs, interspersed with fragmentary narratives of original stories. Fiction uses an analogous technique of collocation. Each successive chapter of William Faulkner novel As I Lay Dying, for instance, drops the subscriber into a different character’s consciousness wit hout the direction or help of an omniscient narrator. To figure out the plot, the reviewer must work through the perceptions of characters who range from a seven-year-old boy to a madman. The abrupt, disturbing shifts from one consciousness to another are an intend part of the lector’s experience. As with all literary techniques, juxtaposition is used to communicate particular themes. In Cane, a work that defies our usual definitions of literary genres, Jean Toomer pose poetry and brief prose sketches. In this way, Cane establishes its thematic contrast of rural black culture in the South and urban black culture of the North.\r\nMorrison, who wrote her procure’s thesis on two modernists, Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, uses juxtaposition as a structuring device in Sula. though relatively short for a novel, Sula has an unco large number of chapters, eleven. This division into small pieces creates an intended choppiness, the uncomfortable sense of frequently stopping an d starting. The study of the chapters accentuates this choppy rhythm. Almost every chapter shifts the focus from the story of the preceding chapter by changing the point-of-view character or introducing sudden, shocking events and delaying discussion of the characters’ motives until later.\r\nIn â€Å"1921,” for example, Eva douses her son plumb with kerosene and burns him to death. Although the reader knows that clean has pay back a heroin addict, Eva’s reasoning is not revealed. When Hannah, naturally assuming that Eva doesn’t know of Plum’s danger, tells her that Plum is burning, the chapter ends with Eva’s almost daily â€Å"Is? My baby? Burning?” (48). Not until midway through the next chapter, â€Å"1923,” does Hannah’s questioning allow the reader to understand Eva’s motivation. Juxtaposition thus heightens the reader’s sense of in masterlyness. Instead of providing quick resolution, juxtapositio n introduces new and equally disturbing events.\r\nParadoxically, when an occasional chapter does wait a single story apparently complete in itself, it too contributes to the novel’s general choppy rhythm. In a novel victimization a simple, chronological mode of narration, each bring home the bacon chapter would pick up where the last one go away off, with the main characters now involved in a different incident, but in some clear way affected by their previous experience. In Sula, however, some characters figure prominently in one chapter and then fade entirely into the background.\r\nThe first chapter centers on Shadrack, and although he appears twice more and has considerable mental importance to Sula and symbolic importance to the novel, he is not an important actor again. In equal fashion, Helene Wright is the controlling presence of the third chapter, â€Å"1920,” but exactly appears in the rest of the book. These shifts are more unsettling than if Shadrac k and Helene were ancestors of the other characters, generations removed, because the reader would then expect them to disappear. Their initial protuberance and later shadowy presence contribute to the reader’s feeling of disruption. The choppy narration of Sula expresses one of its major themes, the fragmentation of both individuals and the community.\r\nSula. upstart York: Knopf, 1973. Rpt. New York: Penguin, 1982\r\n'