The Narrative Art Of Anti-simplification In Sula

Sula is the second published novel of Toni Morrison, one of the greatest black women writers in America. It tells a story about two black girls'growing up and their friendship in a black community in America. Although the novel is seemingly very short in length and simple in plots, it covers many layers of relationships, according to which, layers of complicated themes are involved. As critics have argued, it is the story of the friendship of two African American women; it is the story of the brutality of wars; it is a story against racial discrimination and segregation; it is a story against inequality between men and women; and it is a story about the hardship of the black's struggle for achieving the self values, and so on. In the aspect of narrative, Morrison refuses to just write a novel of"story telling", telling her readers what she thinks about the events in her novel, but instead she uses a lot of rhetorical techniques to strengthen the complexity, posing some unanswered questions and leaving enough room for the reader to think about them.Therefore, it is not really a simple novel, and just like its titular character Sula, the novel defies simplistic interpretation. This thesis is an analysis of the anti-simplification techniques in light of modern narrative theory, esp. the rhetorical narrative theory, which stresses on the communication between the author and the reader. In the narrative structure of this novel, the circular but not linear narration offers the reader multi-layered visions to interpret the theme. By examining the interrelatedness of the circular narrative structure and these multiple visions, this thesis explores the thematic narrative center and finds that the interrelatedness lies in the process, full of hardships and frustrations, of black people's seeking for the self identity, represented by the protagonists: Sula / Nel, Shadrack, and the Bottom, respectively representing different ways of searching for self and different fates of the"Bottom"people in the white patriarchal society. Therefore, it is the analysis of the circular narrative structure that helps readers to arrive at the central theme.In fact, in Morrison's choices of narrative rhetoric, she employs some narrative tactics to highlight this center by implications. Metaphors and ironies make the interpretation of the novel complicated, and changes of points of view reveal the meaning the author desires to convey; the problems of ethical judgments by the characters typically like Sula leads to the problems of readers'ethical judgments. In this thesis, the analysis of these techniques is conducted by being placed in the context of African-American black culture; and the analysis of how the author's control of distance and its"instabilities"and"tension"work in readers'reading, is to show how readers experience the narrative progression and arrive at the thematic narrative center.Through my analysis of these techniques, it is possible to prove that Morrison's unique narrative style adds Sula's complexity of interpretations, but it also strengthens the readability and even re-readability. Thus, this thesis will hopefully help not only to deepen our understanding and appreciation of it, but also suggest a way to explore her narrative techniques.