Their Eyes Were Watching God Chapter 18 Summary

Everyone has a goal, a mission, a dream. Many dreams of people are far away and in many cases are perceived to be mysterious and merely out of reach. In the story Their Eyes were Watching God, this notion is expressed by the symbol of a horizon. The horizon is a faraway horizontal line between the earth and the sky; between human life and the beyond. This mid point between the possible and impossible is where dreams, wishes, and desires lay. The horizon symbolizes dreams that are seemingly out of reach. In the beginning of the story, this is the state of the dreams of Janie, her horizon. Through chapters 1-9, readers understand through the two failed marriages of Janie, that she dreams to love and be free. Janie wants to love another person

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is rich in fascinating visual imagery. In this passage, three characters, Janie, Motor Boat, and Tea Cake, are attempting to flee from a raging storm while fighting strong winds and avoiding various hazards surrounding them. In addition, they must witness the suffering of other fellow escapees who are not as lucky as them. Hurston uses devices such as personification, simile, and participles to emphasize the chaotic mood and action of the passage. Her utilization of these techniques produces captivating visual imagery and makes the passage more intriguing and provocative.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story about a black woman in the 1930s, Janie’s, quest for real and fulfilling love and freedom. The story begins when her grandmother, Nanny, catches her kissing a boy she doesn’t approve of. Nanny is a former slave who is raising Janie as her own daughter, Janie’s mother, was raped at seventeen, began drinking, and ran away. Countless hardships were faced by Nanny and she was denied opportunities, like marriage, in order to care for Janie and her mother. Therefore, she pressures Janie to marry Logan Killicks before she dies of old age. Despite not wanting to take part in it, Janie obeys, and learns that marriage doesn’t create love as she had thought.

Zora Neale Hurston’s highly acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates many of the writing techniques described in How to Read Literature like a Professor by Tomas C. Foster. In Foster’s book, he describes multiple reading and writing techniques that are often used in literature and allow the reader to better understand the deeper meaning of a text. These of which are very prevalent in Hurston’s novel. Her book follows the story of an African American woman named Janie as she grows in her search for love. Hurston is able to tell Janie’s great quest for love with the use of a vampiric character, detailed geography, and sexual symbolism; all of which are described in Foster’s book.

In Catholic doctrine, the seven cardinal sins are the basis from which all the “sins” of humanity stem. In this system, any moral infraction a person may commit would be categorized under one of these seven sins (also known colloquially as the “seven deadly sins”). This system has been widely adapted throughout culture over the centuries, and is a common tool utilized to examine the actions of humans. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, enters into three marriages, two of which fail based on the failings of her husbands, and the third of which succeeds in spite of the failings of her husband. Each of these husbands, in fact, displays traits which fall under the cardinal sins, and the sin of pride in particular; even the third husband, Tea Cake, displays the very same sin, leading to the downfall of their marriage.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story that is centered around sexuality, power, and gender discrimination. The main character, Janie Crawford¸ is a mulatto. She was raised by her grandmother, a former slave, since the day she was born, “Ah was born back due in slavery…” (Hurston 16). She and her grandmother, Nanny, lived in West Florida on where they lived in the house in the Washburns’—the family that Nanny worked for--back-yard. Nanny scraped together and bought a house that had a pear tree in the back-yard. It was there under the pear tree in her grandmother’s back yard that Janie saw herself as sexual being that began her journey, “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the

Chapter 6 of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Hurston starts out by describing how Janie detests running the store, but also how she finds some joy in listening to the bright stories the townsfolk have on the porch. The guys there like to tease Matt Bonner- a man with an overworked good-for-nothing mule. Jody, regardless of Janie's wonderment in the stories, forbids her from hanginging out with the trashy people out on the porch. Because of the men who constantly are entranced by Janie’s hair, Jody commands her to wear a head-rag around her head due to his overgrown jealousy. One day Matt Bonner’s mule runs away and ends up outside of the store, where some townsmen are torturing it for their own amusement. Janie does not like this and mutters her disapproval, Jody hears her and decides to buy the mule for five dollars so it can finally be at peace. After the mule finally dies, Jody has a mock funeral which turns into a town wide gathering, none of which Janie is allowed to attend to. Later on at the store, Janie and Jody get into an argument where she tells him that he is no fun, and he tells her that he is just trying to be responsible. As time goes on the indignation that Janie holds for Jody only grows stronger. One day, Jody slaps Janie-after seven years of having met each other after a treacherous dinner. Later that same day, Mrs. Robbins begs Jody for a little meat for her family-which Jody spares. The men on the porch talk crudely about the woman,

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a 1937 novel which follows the life of a woman named Janie who, on her journey of finding her identity, marries three men in hopes of discovering her purpose. This novel is about a woman on her expedition to self-realization and fulfilment or perhaps it’s about the importance of the rabies vaccine. For the sake of simplicity, I will argue the former. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a deeply feminist text. Hurston provides us with a plethora of themes that can be viewed through feminist perspective such as Voice, Identity and Divergence from the Norm.

In both the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and the poem “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, young girls are lectured on who they should be in life and how they should act.

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on a beautiful mulatto woman named Janie Crawford. This piece of literature carves a tale of what was once an awful time to be an African American. It begins with a brief section of what was the end of the story, and the flash-forward quickly ends after the first chapter. Chapter 2 picks up at the story's true beginning.

As George Bernard Shaw once said, “[l]ife isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” Existence is a series of experience that define societies. From childhood to adulthood, people are expressed by moments. However, no occurrence is more significant than death. In Zora Neale Hurston’s famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character Janie Crawford is plagued by the deaths of loved ones. Janie moves from caregiver to caregiver searching for true love and happiness, only to have it stripped away from her once she finds it in her third husband Tea Cake. At the end of the novel, having realized true love and loss, Janie is a whole woman. Their Eyes Were Watching God portrays the growth of the human spirit

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford, the protagonist in the novel, returns home after a long period of time. She is welcomed back by unfriendly faces and vicious rumors and gossip about her past relationship with young Tea Cake, her third husband. The novel continues with Janie telling her friend, Pheoby Watson, her story in flashback form starting from when she was younger and lived with her grandmother. Janie retold her story about her three marriages with Logan, Jody, and Tea Cake. She explained everything she has experienced and learned from her journey in finding happiness and finding her voice. Their Eyes Were Watching God is full of figurative language, the majority of which derives from nature. The natural forces in which the characters struggle against, guide their lives and assist them in self discovery. Examples of the natural forces that are brought up throughout the novel include the horizon, the pear tree, and the hurricane. In the novel, the natural forces are what guide the characters, especially Janie, to find happiness in their lives and find their true identity. As the characters develop and experience their lives through the comparisons of life and nature, the novel celebrates those relationships in order to provide the room to allow the character to keep growing and learning..

The topic of racism is a very intriguing one for me. Other authors criticized Zora Neal Hurtson that she, being a black woman during the black liberation movement in the 1910’s, should be writing about black people being set free and how they are being suppressed by the world around them. Instead, Zora mainly deals with the issues of the women being suppressed and not allowed to be free. This idea itself mirrors that of freeing black people, but yet authors of the time were not able to see that, they called her book artificial and did not help them in their quest for freedom.

Throughout history, the aspiration to accomplish one’s dreams and gain self-fulfillment has been and continues to be prevalent. Consequently, one’s reactions to the obstacles propelled at them may define how they will move forward in search of achieving their goals. Reaching one’s full potential is certainly not an easy conquest. Zora Neale Hurston, an especially noteworthy African American author, uses her astounding piece of literature, Their Eyes Were Watching God, to illuminate the path to discovering what is truly valuable in life. She uses the character, Janie Woods, who endures some of the greatest hardship imagined to elucidate the ways in which hindrance, although discouraging, only makes one stronger. Accordingly, Hurston argues

The hurricane is another area in the novel where God is often made reference to and it also changes the good life on the muck that Janie and Teacake had become accustomed to. Although Teacake thinks the hurricane will pass over and Janie decides to stay with him, a fear-inducing burst of wind and rain makes them both realize that it is actually a very serious storm. Hurston shows how she and the characters feel about what happens when, "Six eyes were questioning God" (235). They are no longer looking to the boss or the white man for direction, but to God. The specific time when the title was produced in the novel was during the hurricane when "they seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God" (236). While Teacake was dying from the rabid dog bite, Janie also shows that she believes God has power of the outcome of the situation when she says, "Was He noticing what was going on around here? He must be because He knew everything" (264). This alludes to the characters seeing God as having the ultimate control over destiny and Hurston was no doubt reflecting the prevailing attitude of the time in which she lived.