Shape of Experience in Morrison's Essay

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With real sense of self, she will have a skewed look at the world around her. In her eyes, she is empty, as is the world.

Nel is grounded but this does not mean she is complete. Sula is labeled a wild child because she is not conventional like those around her. She moves to get herself away from Bottom and has several casual affairs with men. When she returns, the townspeople view her as wicked. Those in her town call her a "roach" (112) and "bitch" (112) and her death is a welcome relief. She has an affair with Nel's husband, which makes Nel look like nothing short of an angel in the novel. Sula's life was not nice and neat. Nel married and had children, which was something of a traditional lifestyle for a woman. In short, Nel conforms to what society expects of women. Sula decided not to choose this road. Sula fell into bouts of pessimism at times while Nel was more controlled, albeit she was controlling at times. These women could not have lived lives that were more different from one another and what this shows us is that there must be more to life than what these women had because, in the end, they were not complete individuals. One life was spent living in the shadow of guilt while the other lived behind the veil of denial.

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As such, no life can be complete or fulfilling.

Sula and Nel live most of their lives as incomplete individuals because of what happens in their childhood. There is no arguing that we are shaped by our experiences but we do have power over how we allow ourselves to react to events. Sula and Nel were friends and while they grew up and went their separate ways, we see that looks can be deceiving in some cases. It takes death to bring this to fruition in the novel: the death of Chicken Little and the death of Sula for the events at one are revealed at the other. When Nel visits Sula on her deathbed, she is doing so out of a sense of obligation. While she is there, Sula asks Nel if she realizes she was the good one. Nel knows deep down that Sula was the better one because while Sula stood terrified at Chicken Little's death, Nel enjoyed watching the boy die. The two women are incomplete because they do not understand things as they actually are. Sula lived with guilt for most of her life and Nel lived her life rejecting truth. These characters demonstrate how we can live partial lives because one aspect of our past is too difficult to reconsider.

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