A Contrastive Analysis Of Two Protagonists Depicted By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is an outstanding African American woman writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize as the first black woman writer. In her works, she is closely concerned about the plight and fate of black women. The Bluest Eye and Sula are two typical works of this kind. In these two novels, Morrison created two different protagonists living in a white and male-dominated society: Pecola and Sula. They had different characteristics that led them to different destinies. This thesis focuses on the contrastive analysis of the protagonists in the two novels, which includes their characteristics, relations with the others in the community and responses to the dominant culture and tradition and tries to find some solutions for black women's further search for identity. Through the analysis, we can see the difference between Pecola and Sula: On the way of search for their identity. Pecola is the victim of self-hatred; Sula is the brave a soldier of self-reliance.