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Setting: The setting of Sula is in The Bottom, which is a town in Ohio, during the early twentieth century.

People: The residents of the Bottom are black and they deal with extreme racism and segregation throughout the book. The characters struggle to make a living while the valley above houses middle class whites that can provide for their families. When the people of the valley and the people of the bottom come in contact with each other, it is merely because of an imbalance or conflict between the races.

Loneliness: Loneliness is one of the main topics present in the story. Morrison displays the theme that everyone suffers loneliness and that even if you surround yourself with good people, you can still feel lonely. Sometimes this loneliness is hidden, which is emphasized by the scene of the woman laughing in the book. Throughout the book, loneliness is portrayed in different ways and with different characters portraying it.

“Lonely, ain't it?

Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now you're lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”

― Toni Morrison, Sula

“There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawn shop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.”

― Toni Morrison, Sula

Happiness: Happiness in the Bottom is scarce considering the constant troubles with race. In addition to racism, the people struggled making money to provide for their families. Living below the whites just made this worse. In the neighborhood in which Sula takes place, everyone is close which makes their little privacy between families, but it helps to have people surrounding them who know what they are going through. Overall the main theme wouldn't be happiness, but I think that the people in the Bottom were able to make the most of everything that they had.

Lifestyle in the Bottom: As blacks living below a valley full of middle class whites, makes life difficult. On quiet days people could be heard singing, playing music, or dancing and “laughing although her pain was rested somewhere under the eyelids (pg. 4). People worked to make a living for themselves, and they raised families. Life in the Bottom was not always perfect but it certainly wasn't glorified either.

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