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Analysis Of Their Eyes Were Watching God By Hurston

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While Their Eyes Were Watching God is a work of fiction, it has been considered autobiographical as well. Hurston reveals her personality through the interaction of the author’s, protagonist’s, narrator’s voices and through the narrative events. For example, Hurston's own father can be found lodged in some of the characteristics of Jody. Like Jody, Hurston's father moved to an exclusively black town called Eatonville. John Hurston was also noted for “being very ambitious, owning property and having a prominent position of carpenter, Baptist preacher and, attaining a position of power within the South Florida Baptist Association.”(1) Like Jody, he sought to be a leader within that fledgling community of Eatonville. Janie similarly shares many …show more content…

The novel is about Janie's journey, in a psychological and a physical sense. Zora was very much a traveler herself, exploring America with a theatre group and in search of other jobs and experiences. Later on in her life, she managed to find patrons to support her through academic programs. She was fascinated in “anthropological research into the folklore and cultural heritage of the southern blacks”(5). This curiosity initiated her to go on many places gathering information in the South, and while she travelled she erudite more about herself as she returned to her roots. These trips essential have influenced her work deeply, her observance of "Negro" culture is utmostly noticeable through her use of dialect as the dominant language pattern. There is a cordiality that originates from her characters and portrayal of community life that proposes that she is not merely a spectator of the culture, but a part of it as well. For instance when Janie and Tea Cake live on the "muck" they join in with games of "Florida flip" and "coon-can" (p.233), reciting rhythms beginning with "Yo' mama don't wear no Draws" (p.232), skipping with the Bahamans and telling exaggerated stories. There is a genuine and real sense of Zora's pride and marvel at her people's culture, it forms the backdrop of the novel and enhances …show more content…

In her autobiography, she writes that she "walked by her corpse, smelt it and felt it" (p.135). The notion that one can be living, although dead spiritually or emotionally, is also found in Their Eyes Were Watching God - even the corpse image is used. Zora as a child was imaginative and curious, often claiming, "the trees, birds, and lake talked to her" (p14, Zora Neale Hurston by Howard). In the novel the pear tree talks to Janie in an "inaudible voice" (p.24) about marriage. On page 44 of Dust Tracks on a Road she reminisces that she "used to climb to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our front gate and look out over the world. The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon". This is similar to the where a sixteen-year-old Janie "searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps". This natural curiosity is deceptive in both Janie and Hurston from an early age and starts the beginning of a journey through life looking to the horizon. It is remarkable that in the novel it ended with Janie pulling "in her horizon like a great fish-net". The horizon is no more in front of her but around her, the journey is

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Zora Hurston a superior author who wrote short stories and often used folklore, and religious references in her writing. Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God uses symbolism throughout the book followed with a vast amount of metaphors and similes. She used this unique style in order to draw in the reader's attention and to get them to feel as if they were there. Hurston starts every chapter out with either a metaphor or a simile. For instance the very first sentence of Their Eyes Were Watching God is a metaphor, “ Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”

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In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is a young woman who struggles to find her identity. Janie Separates her exterior life from her interior life by keeping certain thoughts and emotions inside her head, and she reconciles this by while presenting the proper woman society expects her to be. Janie also silently protests to those expectations by acting against what people require of her, both emotionally and physically. When Janie’s rude and abusive husband, Joe, dies, Janie is glad because she is finally free from him.

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Character can be determined just based on language, how one speaks, and/or uses words. The most common use of language in this autobiography is figurative language; Zora Neale uses figurative language to express herself and her mother. If one's words are expressed adequately then the reader can easily understand how her and her mother see things representing who they are. In Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, she uses mostly figurative language to express herself, to show how she feels and acts as a person.

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Among a number of accomplishments and works of literature created by Zora, the most famous is titled Their Eyes Were Watching God. This book is about a pleasing but shy young lady that develops into a woman with a strong mindset and aspiration for greatness. The most compelling and distinguished writer, Zora, also wrote a autobiography of her life titled, Dust Tracks on a Road. This novel is famous due to the fact that it covers her famous life from the beginning of her childhood to the peak of her stardom. It describes her accomplishments, achievements, and a little of her love life.

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In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston traces Janie’s quest for independence and the search of her self-confidence through events that happened before and after her epiphany immediately following Joe’s death. Throughout the novel Janie’s view of life, her independence, and her view of love changed exceedingly depending on who she was married to. This story centers around an important epiphany that Janie has when Joe dies; that personal discoveries and life experiences help people find themselves. Before her revelation, when Janie is 16 years old, she experiences a moment of realization in she discovers new-found feelings about love, marriage, . Under the pear-tree, she has a perfect moment in nature, full of passion

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Hurston was famous for writing the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She wrote this famous novel while traveling to Haiti. Hurston got the idea for the novel when she arrived in New York. There she meet Dr. Franz Boas, known as, “the Father of Anthropology” (The Big Read). She fell in love with a 23 year old named Percy Punter.

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses speech as a tool to show the progression of the story. Janie Crawford, the main character of the novel, finds her true identity and ability to control her voice through many hardships. When Janie’s grandmother dies she is married off, to be taken care of. In each marriage that follows, she learns what it is to be a woman with a will and a voice. Throughout the book, Janie finds herself struggling against intimidating men who attempt to victimize her into a powerless role.

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Throughout the novel, the readers experience growing up with Janie, from her mid-teens to her forties, getting to experience her life lessons and seeing her hopes and dreams. Janie dreamed of experiencing a great love, similar to the love she saw from the bee and the blossoming flower, but her marriages were nothing like that, which provides themes of growing up and love, by following Janie through life. Considering Zora Neale Hurston's life, she was very controversial both politically and socially. Reflected throughout her novel and the reviews she received about it, both positive and negative. A review depicting the message of the novel states that the "fevered, hallucinatory vehemence suggests a far more complex response to color than Hurston's champions today can comfortably allow"(Claudia

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In The Eyes are Watching God, the author Zora Neale Hurston expresses the struggles of women and black societies of the time period. When Hurston published the book, communities were segregated and black communities were full of stereotypes from the outside world. Janie, who represents the main protagonist and hero, explores these communities on her journey in the novel. Janie shows the ideals of feminism, love, and heroism in her rough life in The Eyes. Janie, as the hero of the novel, shows the heroic qualities of determination, empathy, and bravery.

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses multiple voices throughout the story to show all the parts that come together to fully understand Janie’s story. It seems important to acknowledge that there are two narrators: Janie and the anonymous speaker that helps Janie tell her story. Although Janie is the main narrator, the anonymous narrator speaks every now and then about Janie. The main example is at the very beginning of the story when the anonymous narrator is telling of Janie walking back into Eatonville and describing the scene.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of how one man, Tea Cake, changes how a grown woman named Janie views life, opportunity, and happiness. Zora Neale Hurston employs parallelism in order to reveal the dynamic of this relationship between Janie and Tea Cake and writes, “He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place” (Hurston 128). At the very end of the book, Hurston writes again, “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net.

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Motif writing assignment for Eyes Were Watching God In the eyes were watching god the story occasionally focuses on race and racism in the south during the early 20th century. For instance, Janie's unusual beautiful appearance as a fair skinned black woman, living in the black american south receives a lot of attention from a variety of places and encounters racist attitudes from the community. One place Janie experienced racist attitudes was in chapter 1 when a man took pictures without asking anybody of Janie with other white children and then a week later they brought the pictures “Everybody laughed, even Mr.Washburn. Mis Nellie, de Mama of de chillun who come back home after her husband dead, she pointed to de dark one and said, ‘Dats you, Alphabet, don't you know yo own self?’”

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston develops a contrast between the male and female genders of the time period of the story, and the male and female gender of today. Hurston wrote this novel in or about a time when women were considered simple-minded , women were disempowered by the empowered man in the relationship, and women can only gain power through marriage. But when Janie kisses Johnny Taylor, her view of men changes after seeing “a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!

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Zora Neale Hurston, an author during the Harlem Renaissance, wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, an amazing novel written about the losses and loves of a lady named Janie Crawford. The author describes the way Janie found out who she really was and what love was throughout her three marriages. Janie’s first two marriages were unfulfilling and not healthy for herself. Janie realized what true love was when she met Tea Cake. Janie’s first marriage was to a man named Logan Killicks, which was forced upon her by her grandmother.

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston wrote in a way that conveyed a message through her characters, using a storytelling "frame" to express her ideas. Hurston did not stop by means to get her point across. Hurston uses Janie’s thoughts and actions to represents how during Reconstruction, African Americans were trying to find their identities and achieve their dreams of independence. At the start of the novel Hurston begins to illustrate how African Americans in Eatonville feel about their lives.

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