Sula By Toni Morrison: Nature Of Good And Evil

Benjamin Park

Mrs. Heile

4 April 2023

Sula Essay Assignment

The Acts of Good and Evil

Toni Morrison’s novel explores the nature of good and evil through three African American Women: Nel, Eva and Sula. As the novel unwinds, these three characters take very different paths with their lives. Each character has their own way with their actions in the life that they live in, with Nel adjusting to the norms of society, Sula becoming a social outcast, and Eva stuck with hatred of her husband that she is unable to show guidance to her children. These characters actions are shaped through the social and cultural ways that these characters have been surrounded by. Sula and Eva’s actions are not always necessarily bad choices, along with Nel’s actions

Sula is a rebellious character who disregards social norms and is known to engage in behavior like casually having sex in her everyday life. This type of behavior is noticeable when Sula has sex with her best friend’s husband and ruins her friendship. Sula made a poor mistake when Nel had saw that, “they had been down on all fours naked, not touching except their lips right down there on the floor where the tie is pointing …Nibbling at each other, just their lips, and when I opened the door, they didn’t even look for a minute”, which had Nel shocked and distraught (105). This was a decision that was good in Sula’s mind because of her individuality, but it really showed betrayal and ruined her friendship. Nel witnessed them continuing to make love even after she entered the room, shows the reader that Jude and Sula don’t really care. It shows that this is a normal action for Sula, because she is known to have sex with multiple different men often. All throughout the novel, the author shows that, “one can never really define good and evil”, which is in a way expressing not all good natures from a

She struggles to take care of her own children and raises them poorly. Eva makes poor choices when taking care of her children. She first delivers her children with a close neighbor and leaves without their real guardian for almost two years. She was so desperate that "She gives up a leg in order to survive, in order that her children may survive" (Bergenholtz, 7). The result of this decision was both positive and negative for her family. Leaving for almost two years made her distant from her children, but she returned with money that she desperately needed. Eva struggles to be a strong mother and giving an example of her losing her leg, she struggles to make the right decisions. Eva’s son, Plum, was suffering from a heroin addiction and left Eva with no way to help. As a response to the situation, “she rolled a bit of newspaper into a tight stick about six inches long, lit it and threw it onto the bed where the kerosene-soaked” (47). Toni Morrison shows the reader in these two events, that Eva clearly struggles to deal with her problems. As a relation to Sula, Eva makes poor decisions to get rid of her own struggles and to make her problems go