The Protagonist In Toni Morrison's Sula

Despite the name and approach of the novel, Sula consist of three main protagonists: Shadrack, Sula/Nel and the black people who live in the community of Medallion. All three protagonists are bind together to form a center focus (Reddy 3). Reading Sula, readers may apply that the novel is based on only Sula's actions and her unorthodox behavior she presents. She follows her instant passion unaware of the effect it may have on other people's feelings.
Sula Peace was brought up in a boarding house of a disturbing separation between mothers and daughters, where she grows to become an uncontrolled woman. The only person who can understand her character is her best friend Nel Wright who then they become "something worse than enemies" (Morrison).
The power of love in Sula and Nel's relationship becomes so forceful that it is evident that these two characters are represented as one. Sula and Nel first met at the swings and sense some type of connection between each other. But only together will their love be functional because they complete each other's opposite. Sula doesn't believe that Nel is "the other half" nor another person, but a "second self" (qtd. in Reddy). Sula wants to be Nel and Nel wants to be just like Sula (Reddy). But Sula wishes to be so much like Nel that she has sex with Jude and later describes the condition to fill "this space in front of me, behind me, in my head" (Morrison 144).
In 1927, Nel and Sula both finish school and start their beginnings as women. Before Sula takes off to go to college, she witnesses her best friend get married to a young man called Jude. Sula was very happy for her best friend, but was also losing a piece of herself. Sula's main focus in leaving Medallion for college was to search for "self by exploring the wider world" (Reddy). On her journey, Sula realizes that every city "held the same people," and that she could not accomplished the quest to find her personal self (qtd. Morrison 120). Sula never reaches her goal in finding self because she has no way of designing self. Since Nel designed an imagined that she can have a relationship with a man, "Sula is willing to try to do so as well" (qtd. Reddy 10).
Sula's willingness to have a relationship with man caused her to have a sexually encounter with Jude (Reddy 9). Sula's encounter with Jude was not because she admire or had affection for Jude, but because her and Nel had always shared some type of connection with other people. Nel walked in on Sula and Jude having sex, only concerned with his "privates" hanging out, he "not knowing that his fly was open" and Sula "didn't look naked to me." (qtd. Morrison 106). The reality that Nel didn't notice Sula naked concludes the definite possibility that these two women are as one. Sula's affair with Jude gave Jude the assumption that she wanted to be with him, unaware that Sula did not love him but only wanted to be with him because of Nel.
When the community found out what Sula did with Nel's husband Jude, they all began to think evil thoughts about Sula. The community loves Sula, but the same love when you have passion or some type of fondness for a person. The community's love for Sula is in a bizarre rage emotion because her only crime of being evil is because she does not focus on womanly responsibilities like the rest of the women. "Nel merges with the community; Sula becomes its center" (qtd Reddy).