The role of death, both physically and mentally, has a heavy effect on characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula. Shadrack survives as a soldier during World War I, dealing directly with death that he sees all around. Like Shadrack, Plum returns home...

In her fascinating 1973 novel, Sula, Toni Morrison deconstructs traditional understandings of the oppositions between self and other, rationality and emotion, and good and evil to reveal the similarities and differences among all people, adding up...

Toni Morrison’s Sula and Song of Solomon examine the ways in which black people in black towns with black ideologies can be physically and emotionally destroyed by the infiltration of any and all institutions that are orchestrated and controlled...

Richard Wright and Toni Morrison are considerable influences within the African American canon, authoring works that reflect the expansion of the human condition to the conditions of the oppressed. Both authors highlight, within their narratives,...

Toni Morrison’s Sula celebrates liberation from society’s constraints on individuality and self-discovery, and illustrates the negative impact of conformity. The novel follows the lives of several members of The Bottom’s community who refuse to...

Love is said to be blind, and sex impervious to reason. However, a person’s outlook on sex is incredibly telling of that person's fundamental outlooks upon life itself. To some, it is a sacred act to be committed in marriage only, and to others it...

Absence is an exceedingly powerful thing. Absence is not a brief silence, or an easily forgotten moment, or a matter of little or no consequence. It is a feeling of perpetuity, a constant gnawing in the stomach and at the back of the mind. Absence...

In Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, the characters’ attitudes towards their sexualities are shaped by their identity-forming processes. Sula and Nel, despite their similarities, have clashing beliefs about sex due to the vastly different female role...

As intricate entities, humans are like prisms: we have several layers that make up our inherent nature. During various interactions and instances, we react differently and thus allow novel parts of us to become apparent. Sula, in Toni Morrison's...

Toni Morrison’s Sula and August Wilson’s Fences have countless similarities. The two stories, which at their cores revolve around African American struggles, showcase the complexities of being a person of color in a rapidly changing society....

Since its publication in 1973, Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Sula has awed readers with its thought provoking imagery and themes. Sula tells the story of the Peace family, which consists of Eva, Hannah, Plum, Pearl, and Sula. The Peace family faces...

Through the first line of Sula, Toni Morrison gives a sense of place, community, and culture. By starting the novel after all the events of Sulahave taken place, she is able to give the reader the notion that every single detail is responsible for...

Tar Baby, written by Toni Morrison, tells the story of two people from two very different worlds and their journey to find love in a world filled with societal norms, discriminations, and strong ties to the past. The lives of Son and Jadine...

All human beings spend the first nine months of their lives in their motherâs womb. From the moment of birth, we wrestle with the notion of âmother:â? we love this woman and feel intense connections to her, and yet we inevitably need to separate...

The power of myth and tradition to shape and control the shared consciousness of communities is a recurring theme in Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise. Morrison uses the residents of the town of Ruby and the nearby Convent to illustrate the...

Song had always been an aspect of life and literature. Dating back to the first epics of Homer, music has been understood as an important achievement. Since then, song has not only become a plot point in some stories, for example the tale of...

Abortion is often a taboo subject that does not appear in American Literature. Yet, Toni Morrison and William Faulkner use abortion in their works to critique women’s agency in motherhood in a patriarchal system. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying...

Post-colonialism is concerned with the effects of colonization on the colonized. In fact, Richard Schur argues “that there can be no simple escape from the effects race, racism, gender, and sexism without some sort of decolonization” (277). One...

Societally, most individuals enjoy believing that they are without bias. Whether it be gender, race, disability, or religion, everyone has preconceived notions about select people groups. While this can be difficult to admit, Toni Morrison...

The question of racial issues is a serious challenge even in the modern society as the norms and values which were created many centuries ago are not as easy to overcome as it could be. Toni Morrison in her work Recitatif depicts how two girls...

In Recitatif by Toni Morrison, the theme of racism is addressed extensively which is rather common in American literature during the late twentieth century. However, Morrison’s approach is fairly different from other literature that tackles the...

As humans, we experience hardships, in some cases more drastic than others, over the course of our lives. Subconsciously, we may repress memories depending on the degree to which they physically and/ or emotionally damage us as means to best cope...

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy deals with life’s biggest problems regarding the choice to love and protect over the ability to stay close to the ones that you love. The end of the novel, narrated by Florens mother, gives key insight to the foundations of...

Environmentally conscious writing can depict gender constructions in so many different ways depending upon what point the author tries to make. For instance, in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson focuses on how the environment impacts women much more...