nal growth, Ajax doesn't return the feeling for he desires the Sula who is so distinctly separate and complete in her solitude. When Sula asks that Ajax to lean on her, she means to limit him, to bind him to her. Understanding Sula's use of language immediately, Ajax rejects the relationship at this point. "He dragged (Sula) under him and made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of man about to leave for Dayton" (Morrison 134). Soon afterward, she finds his driver's license and realizes that she never even knew his real name. This loss, combined with the others, destroys Sula.Alvarez's book is, more or less, a gathering of memories-an attempt to make sense of the past and the process that led from the Garcia girls' past to their present. In so doing, Alvarez illustrates the realities of assimilation for the Garcia family. It is a poignant story as Alvarez dramatizes the multiple complexities that permeate family life, but it remains a story of ordinary life-not tragedy. Morrison's book, on the other hand, is a tragedy. Sula becomes trapped in a downwardly spiraling cycle of negativity that causes her to become the personification of evil in her community of Medallion. It is not until Sula commits suicide, and her consciousness lives on that she fully realizes that she was not intrinsically evil, but that there is good and evil in everyone (Morrison 146). Thus, it can be seen that while there are similarities between these two novels in their basic orientation, the way that each author uses language results in very different perspectives. ...
