Sula Betrayal Quotes

After leaving Eva with three kids and no money, BoyBoy returns, accompanied by a woman who seems to be his girlfriend. After a short visit, during which he fails to even ask about his children, BoyBoy walks out and says something to the woman that is probably about Eva. When the two laugh, his betrayal of Eva is complete. Not only has he left her; he's now making fun of her with another woman.

This is betrayal in the most common sense of the word. Hannah betrays her friends by sleeping with their husbands, and husbands betray their wives by having affairs. This type of betrayal becomes quite significant later in the novel.

Hannah completely betrays Sula here. She isn't careful enough to make sure that Sula can't hear this conversation, and her words devastate her daughter. Is Hannah required to like her daughter? Perhaps not, but the betrayal occurs when she voices these feelings to her friends.

We see a different type of betrayal here: of humanity betraying itself. The sheriff and the bargeman are so blinded by racism that they fail to realize they're talking about a fellow human being, and someone's child.

Who betrays whom in this passage? It's easy for us to say that Eva betrays Plum by killing him, but is it possible that Plum betrays Eva too? After the hardships she endured to keep her children alive and healthy, and after raising Plum on her own to get him ready to go out into the world, he returns a drug addict on the verge of death. In a way, he has betrayed her by destroying a life she worked so hard to sustain.

Shadrack is betrayed by the government here. As soon as he leaves the hospital we can tell that he is still in need of psychiatric care, that he's not ready to face the world after the war. But he fails to get this care because of concerns about money and space.

Eva betrays Sula by failing to recognize or admit that Hannah was a neglectful mother. By declaring that Sula is the one who should have died, she willfully forgets the lonely and isolated childhood her granddaughter had to endure.

No one knows for sure if Sula sleeps with white men, and no one really cares. The men in the Bottom cast her out forever by suggesting that Sula has somehow betrayed her race. But they themselves have betrayed her by giving her, fairly or unfairly, a label she can never recover from.

We often think of betrayal in big terms: adultery, murder, secrets that ruin lives. And while Sula clearly engages in such acts of betrayal (whether intentionally or not), she is incapable of engaging in the small betrayals that most of us commit from time to time. She can't pretend that the women in the Bottom have aged well or that she cares about the things they talk about. So rather than being dishonest, she simply accepts her isolation.

Is it possible that it's Nel who betrays Sula in the incident with Jude? By judging Sula like the other women in the Bottom, does Nel betray all that the two women shared as girls? Here Sula places the blame firmly on Nel's shoulders, challenging her to question why she let their friendship disintegrate.