The Desires Of Nel And Sula By Toni Morrison

Companionship is one of the greatest desires a human can have. People often do anything to try and find the person they believe is “the one”. However, feelings can be difficult to understand since even if the emotion is identified, the cause can be hard to understand. When faced with heartbreak people often take extreme actions to try and make it less painful but end up making the situation worse for themselves. In Sula by Toni Morrison, this idea is represented by Nel. Sula follows two girls, Nel and Sula, and their journey from childhood to adulthood. In their childhood they exhibit similar tendencies, both having the same desires so they have an extremely close relationship. Once they group up Nel experiences a heartbreak and misinterprets

When dreaming of what could be, Nel and Sula have similar fantasies. While Nel sits on the porch of her oppressively neat house she dreams of something that creates a stark contrast to her surroundings. Instead of a tame lifestyle, she envisions “herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince.” (Morrison 51). In Nel’s fantasy, she’s sprawled across a flower bed with her tangled hair flowing across it as if she was a princess. She wishes for her fiery prince to join her and ignite some passion in her life. However, the prince doesn't arrive in her dream; instead he “watch[es] the dream along with her, [with] smiling sympathetic eyes” (51). She settles for someone who watches the dream with her and is enamored with all the small details of her perfect world. Although she settles for just watching and having someone to watch with her, she still dreams of a fairy-tale world with someone who shares similar dreams. Meanwhile, Sula daydreams of a similar scenario. In her dream Sula “gallop[s] through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared both the taste and speed” (52). Sula takes up the image of a knight riding a noble steed through a field while also taking the time to smell the roses and enjoy the sweet taste of sugar. She

When Sula returns to the Bottom she and Nel get to talk for the first time in a long time. Nel says she felt “new, soft, and new. It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years” (98). In the ten years that Sula has been gone, not once has she actually experienced joy. Instead, she learns to deal with a mundane life in which joy is rarely found. Upon Sula’s return, it sparked something new in her. She is no longer living the same sad life, she is experiencing true joy and laughing harder than she ever has before. It's Sula that makes her life joyous again. In the ten years that Sula is away, she isn't entirely content either. Sula is trying to find someone that she can connect with but she realizes she’ll never find it because “She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and never could be-for a woman. And that no one would ever be the version of herself which she sought out to reach and touch with her ungloved hand” (121). In her time away Sula craved to find someone who shared her “taste and speed” (55) but no matter who she slept with, they never delivered the connection she was looking for but she felt she could