Symbiotic Relationship In Toni Morrison's Sula Peace

A symbiotic relationship is a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship between two people or groups. All living beings, weather you are the president of the United States or a homeless person living in a shelter, depend on symbiotic relationships to live a healthy and productive life. However, sometimes these persons can become greedy and decide to take more of the relationship than what they are putting in it. When this occurs, the relationship takes on parasitic characteristics. In the novel "Sula," by Toni Morrison, Nel Wright and Sula Peace demonstrate how a friendship can start out as a symbiotic relationship and quickly spiral into an unhealthy relationship. When one person in the relationship betrays the other by taking instead of giving, the other person
They had always shared everything and Sula didn't see why this was any different. Now Nel's " thighs were truly empty and dead too, and it was Sula who had taken the life from them" (Morrison 110-111). Sula took Nel's primary symbiotic partner from her. Her thighs were left empty at the pleasure of Sula's. Nel's happiness left when her thighs went dead. Since Sula now had no man, and no Nel, she found herself a new man by the name of Ajax. Sula wanted Ajax to stay with her and take the place of Nel in their symbiotic relationship. However, Ajax wanted nothing to do with a permanent relationship. He chose to metaphorically commit suicide and leave Sula. Even if he did once love her, he knew that the relationship between them would eventually turn parasitic. The man that Sula had clung to for protection left quickly without as much as a note. She said after he left, "I didn't even know his name. And if I didn't know his name, then there is nothing I did know and I have known nothing ever at all since... Nel was the one who told me the truth" (Morrison 136). Now that Nel was gone, Sula had no one to turn too, and she would slowly begin to kill