Sula and Fight Club

     During my initial reading of Sula, I began to wonder about what kind of things I should try to find connections to. At first, I kept thinking about events in the story and what they reminded me of. The childhood friendship between Nel and Sula that seemingly fell apart when their conservative and liberal upbringings collided reminded me of the story of Forrest Gump. The community-wide distain for Sula and the resulting rumors reminded me of Mean Girls. However, I began to realize the importance of themes in the class discussion. The strong imagery of Nel and Sula being two parts of the same person reminded me of the movie Fight Club. It was an unlikely match, but as I thought about it more, the more it made sense. Fight Club had two distinctive characters who mirrored Nel and Sula.

     In Fight Club, the unnamed narrator is a corporate employee of an automobile manufacturer. He leads an orthodox life and is wrapped up in his consumerism and set of Ikea furniture. His monotonous life coupled with insomnia makes his life seem like a blur. One day, the narrator finds his apartment and all of his material possessions destroyed by a fire. He calls Tyler Durden, a person who sat next to him on an airplane, and asks for help. They subsequently start to live and go out together. Later, they start a fight on friendly terms outside a bar. This single fight between two people grows into an underground boxing club. Then, Tyler starts turning the fight club into an anti-corporation rebel group called Project Mayhem. Tyler leads the organization into more ambitious tasks, culminating in the destruction of financial buildings with explosives. The narrator stands by and just watches. The big twist in this movie is that after someone greets the narrator as Tyler, he realizes that they are the same person, and Tyler is a projection of his disassociated identity disorder.

     I saw a connection of personalities between Nel and the narrator and  between Sula and Tyler. Nel believes in the traditional values of family and marriage, and the narrator blindly follows consumerism and his corporate job. Sula decides to ignore the obligation of marriage and having children, similar to Tyler's rebellion against mainstream values. Nel and the narrator spend their lives trying to achieve society's goals, but they never complete their family or Ikea furniture set. Sula and Tyler define their own happiness and live their lives without regrets, regardless of their impact on other people's lives.

     Certain events in the book reminded me of scenes from the movie as well. The part where the two girls mimic each others actions and combine their two smaller holes into a single larger one illustrates that they are very much alike each other. Analogously, the narrator and Tyler suffer from the same lip wounds after they fight, as pictured above. Furthermore, they are constantly drinking the same type of beverage. In this post fight scene, they share a beer and throw the bottle away at the same time. The second scene connection I saw was when Sula indirectly kills Chicken Little. Nel lacks remorse since she doesn't feel like she played a part in it. After Eva calls her by Sula's name, she realizes she is as much to blame for his death. The same goes for the narrator's lack of involvement with Project Mayhem; he realizes that he was the leader of the whole operation after a man calls him Tyler.

     Although the two plots are vastly different, I thought the characterization of Nel, Sula, the narrator, and Tyler were incredibly comparable. Both stories left me with the conclusion that if you let society determine your life goals, you will never be satisfied, but if you ignore mainstream values and follow your desires, your life will be your own to control.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post, and Happy Chinese New Year!