Sweat By Zora Neale Hurston

Zayan Farzad Ms. Barnett English 9 Honors April 3, 2024.

Comparing “Sweat” and “Thoughts on the African American Novel”

The texts “Sweat” written by Zora Neale Hurston and “Thoughts on the African American Novel” authored by Toni Morrison provide insight into different cultures during the early 20th century. Both works were written by African-American females, in which they both had extremely weak roles in society. “Sweat” is a short story about an African American couple living in Florida with the wife named Delia and the husband named Sykes. Sykes is an abusive husband and frequently harms Delia, and she tries to escape this abusive household. “Thoughts on the African American Novel” explores ideas on what shaped novels written by African

The dialogue in “Sweat” is realistic speech like language and uses African American “slang”. “Sweat” says, “'Nother thing, where you been wid mah rig?”( Zora Neale Hurston 1). This line of dialogue in the text has words that aren’t in the English dictionary and cannot be defined, but could easily be understood by the people in the story. This is because these words and style of speech were common to African Americans at the time and was the way they normally talked; similar to a foreign accent. The tone in which the dialogue is presented in “Sweat” is one of the many things that allows it to fit into Morrison’s criteria for the African American

“To make the story appeal oral, meandering, effortless, spoken— to have the reader feel the narrator without identifying the narrator.” (Morrison 3). When she says this, she is implying the fact that when the reader is viewing the text, they should be able to hear the voices of the characters talking in their head, and not just reading the dialogue. “Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time." The vernacular speech being written in “Sweat” is an example of how African Americans who talk similar to the dialogue in the passage can hear the conversation going on because it is written how it is