Imagery In Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, comparisons are depicted vividly through the scenic images that the audience imaginatively recreates. Hurston is able to animate various images and scenes through her use of diction, creating for her audience a sensory experience. Throughout her novel, the image of a horizon is illustrated figuratively in order to represent Janie’s emotional growth over the years she spent away from Eatonville. The horizon serves as a motif in this novel, because it is a recurring image that surfaces within Janie’s thoughts and dreams. In different towns surrounded by different people, the horizon and images of the sun are never out of Janie’s sight. Her vision is focused on reaching the horizon and

She is not content living the life that Nanny provided for her and longs to have a life in which she feels the happiest she has ever been. She wants to experience the feelings that she encounters under the pear tree in the beginning of the novel. In her previous relationship, Janie discovers that her life with Logan did not meet her expectations or standards. The spark that she had hoped and believed would surface never did and the realization that that was her life had set in. The love did not come and she felt trapped in a life she did not wish for herself, so her life with Logan is sacrificed. Later, when Janie is introduced to Joe Starks, "Janie pulled back a long time because he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance" (Hurston 29). Joe was representative of a life that was new and exciting to her. She had feelings of exhilaration and optimism, because Janie felt that her horizon was in reach. Through Joe, Janie hoped that her dreams were not so far away, because he reminds her of the change she wants to see in her life. Nearing the end of her and Joe’s relationship and following Joe’s death, Janie discovers once again that her horizon is still far away. The way that Joe treated Janie as an object and as a puppet drove Janie to resentment. Hurston states that, “Digging around in herself like that she found that . . . she hated her grandmother and had hidden it from herself all these ears under a cloak of pity” (89). Janie’s self-reflection allows her to realize how much Nanny suppressed Janie from being able to reach her horizon. Hurston explains that Nanny, “had taken the biggest thing God had ever made, the horizon . . . and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her” (89). Janie resents