Zora Neale Hurston Character Analysis

Raised by a former slave and written during the reconstruction of the civil war, Janie takes control of Zora Neale Hurston’s life through words on a page. While multiple civil rights movements were going on Hurston decided to represent herself through the life of someone else. After a life of searching for her ideal mate, she finally finds someone who will let her work as she pleases, and does not condone her passion for writing. Janie’s drive and passion for a love that she truly wants demonstrates how the characters are moving forward in unison to the country during reconstruction. The way that Hurston represents herself in the book proves that she is writing fiction to express how she is feeling in real life. During Janie’s relationships

The violence that erupts for the emancipated slaves after the fifteenth amendment was almost identical to what happened with Janie after Tea Cake was bit by the dog with rabies. The sudden change in action was a dead giveaway that Hurston related these two occurrences together, and Janie’s thought ¨a great fear had took hold of him. What was this thing that set his brains afire and grabbed at his throat with iron fingers? Where did it come from and why did it hang around him?¨(Hurston 178). The confusion of aggression for the newly freed African Americans was the same for Janie’s confusion of Tea Cake’s fear. In both situations the people involved are forced to accept that although they have recently been granted a great opportunity, it does not come without consequences. For the newly freed Africans who were given the right to vote, it was that they can not trust the government, who just liberated them, to give them protection. And for Janie it was her third attempt at love and she lost it in something completely out of her control, while she threw away her first two opportunities. The consequences faced in the book are a close resemblance to those faces in real life, but on a much smaller