Companionship in Sula

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Companionship in Sula

Humans need to be with other humans. They need the companionship and they need to know that other people care. Most of the time, this companionship that humans seek with each other will evolve into friendship. At other times, the companionships will evolve into love. Differentiating between friendship and love is difficult because there are no clear cut boundaries on either side. What one person might feel as love, the other might distinguish as friendship or vice versa. The differentiation between love and friendship can be so difficult that not even the people involved in the relationship could realize it. The people involved would only believe that their relationship was simply friendship, not realizing that they are in fact in love. This idea has been explored in countless movies, music, and books. One such book where this idea was explored is Sula. In the novel, Sula Peace and Nel Wright maintain a close-knit friendship, so close that the reader can infer that line between friendship and love has been blurred, but Sula and Nel do not realize it.

The first instance of homosexual undertones arise when the narrator is discussing their childhood. "Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on… they found in each other's eyes the intimacy they were looking for." (52) This quote from the novel embodies the ideal relationship. People explore serious relationships (such as love and marriage) with each other because they are searching for intimacy. Even as children, they knew that they found within each other something that they thought they might not be able to find anywhere else. They needed each other to grow, much like how two people in a serious relationship will grow ...

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... was for sure that they would be married.

Everything in the novel seems to lead up to their relationship with each other, and how integral it is for them to have each other in their lives. The mental connection that the two of them shared surpassed that of Jude's and Nel's, and even with Sula seeing so much more of the world than Nel has, she never found a man that could fill that void for her. A key point of that is that she explicitly says that she was never able to find a man able to make her feel the way that Nel made her feel. It's extremely possible, that by exploring this relationship between them, Nel and Sula would have ended up much happier than anyone could have ever perceived. Only by exploring the boundaries between friendship and love, can the boundaries ever be drawn. If these boundaries are never drawn, then true happiness can never really be found.

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