There are three terrifying deaths in Sula by Tony Morrison, e.i. the death of an anonymous soldier watched by Shadrack, the death of Chicken Little and the death of Hannah. These deaths, though terrifying and even disgusting, attracted my eyes and lingered in my mind when I read Sula for the first time. They may be intolerable to eyes but extraordinary in arts. This paper will mainly discuss the arts of the three terrifying deaths in Sula in terms of their contributions to the theme of this novel.
Across a field in France, running with his comrades in 1917, Shadrack ‘saw the face of a soldier near him fly off’. And ‘before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier’s head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet. But stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of brain tissue down its back.’(1919, Sula). Horrifying it is, the vivid description adds to the reliability of this novel. And the reason of the ‘madness’ of Shadrack is proved here——he experienced psychological trauma which resulted in a permanent disruption of the mental operation(Zhu Yongling, 2017). Watching the inhumane death so clearly totally destroyed him. Thus the National Suicide Day and his strange behaviour were actually a way for Shadrack to escape the misery in this absurd world. By depicting the dreadful scene of the war, Morrison not only helped her readers to have a better understanding of the miserable madness of one of the main character in Sula but also showed the inhumanity of wars, one of the theme of this novel.
The second unusual death is the drowning of Chicken Little. Tony Morrison repeatedly reverses the reader’s expectations(Karen F. Stein
, 1984). Before his death, Sula and her friend Nel peacefully played with each other. They digged a hole and tried to buried it together. Morrison spent a long paragraph to depict hole-digging, at which readers may feel a little bit confused. She once said in an interview that if she wrote something strange, it suggested that something horrible was going to happen. Sula and Nel was amusing Chicken Little joyfully when suddenly he slipped out over the water. He was drowned. Nevertheless, the reaction of the two girls to the death of Chicken Little was also mysterious. Normally, children who watch death should react dramatically but they did not. From this, we can figure out the life of the black community. They live a watery and poor life oppressed by the white so what the unusual brought to the girls was not pain but excitement. Morrison here implicitly criticized racism. And the death of the boy also suggested women’ resistance towards the patriarchal society. In addition, it may also contribute to the eccentric character of Sula in her latter life(Zhu Yongling, 2017).
That Hannah was burned to death was the most horrible one among the three deaths in my mind because of its dramatic contrast of color. ‘Mr. And Mrs. Suggs hoisted up their tub of water in which tight red tomatoes floated and threw it on the smoke-and-flame-bound woman... she lay there on the wooden sidewalk planks, twitching lightly among the smashed tomatoes.(1923, Sula)’ The black burned flesh among the flowers of bloody red tomatoes unfolds a ghostly artistic scene before readers. And this scene creates a sense of depression and gothic of this novel which reflects the miserable life that the black people live.
No matter it is the death of the anonymous solder or the death of Chicken Little or the death of Hannah, they are all ‘ugly’ in readers’ mind. Hugo once said that the ugly exists alongside the beautiful, the deformed next to the graceful, the grotesque behind the sublime, the evil with the good, the shadow with the light. It is the ugly world faced by the black that results in these terrifying scenes. By depicting these horrible plots, Morrison actually was depicting ‘beauty’. The more horrible they are, the stronger aspiration the readers will have towards happiness(Su Dongliang, 2014). The purpose of Morrison is to expose readers to the real life of the black and arouse their sympathy for them. In general, these three terrifying deaths, in my perspective, are one of the most successful parts
Of Sula in terms of its external visual attraction and internal implication.
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