Their Eyes Were Watching God Figurative Language Essay

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston follows the main character Janie’s journey to find love on her own terms. The first man she married, she married to appease Nanny, her grandmother. The second man she marries is Jody Starks, who she marries because she failed to find love for her previous husband. After the oppressive Starks dies, Janie remarries Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods, the only man she has ever loved. They move to “the muck” where Janie feels more at home than ever before because she is with Tea Cake and because she can choose to indulge in her own relations without anyone telling her what to do or with whom to associate.

The high chair or stool in Their Eyes Were Watching God serves to symbolize a person being in a position of extensive power or intense authority. Social class is an important topic throughout the course of the novel. Although Janie is a black woman, she, as a result of her marriage to Joe, is a member of a higher socioeconomic class than her fellow black counterparts. Janie, however, does not equate money with power or worth. On the other hand, Joe believes there is a correlation between a person’s wealth and the extent of the authority they are capable of exhibiting over others. While Joe wants Janie to reside in “a high chair” to “overlook the world”, Janie simply wants to be on the same level as her black counterparts in order to avoid being

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

I enjoyed Their Eyes Were Watching God's grasp on imagination, imagery and phrasing. Janie's dialogue and vernacular managed to carry me along, slipping pieces of wisdom to me in such a manner that I hardly realize they are ingesting something deep and true. Their Eyes Were Watching God recognizes that there are problems to the human condition, such as the need to possess, the fear of the unknown and resulting stagnation. The book does not leave us with the hopelessness of Fitzgerald or Hemingway, rather, it extends a recognition and understanding of humanity's need to escape emptiness. "Dem meatskins is got tuh rattle tuh make out they's alive (183)" Her solution is simple: "Yuh got tuh go there tuh know there." Janie

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 Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, she focuses on the life of the main character, Janie Crawford. The novel takes place in a small town down south called Eatonville in the 1930’s. Janie is on a quest to find her true identity or in other words, her horizon. Along Janie’s quest for true happiness, she faces numerous obstacles that continue to hinder her from finding her true identity and a man she can truly love. As the expectations of others control her life, Janie keeps pushing and is determined to find a true inner happiness. Janie has to fight the expectations of others all throughout the novel until she reaches a point

Compare and contrast the presentation of self-fulfilment in these two texts (Their Eyes Were Watching God and She stoops to conquer)

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is written with a narrative frame. The story begins and ends with two people, Janie and Pheoby, sitting on the porch of Janie's house. Janie is telling her story to Pheoby during the course of an evening, that evening becoming the entire novel. The point of view changes from a first person narrative to a third person omniscient within the first chapter so the reader can experience the story through Janie's eyes while also understanding the other characters and their perspectives.

In the novel "Their Eyes were Watching God," the main character, Janie, faces an inner battle in her three marriages, to speak or not to speak, which manifests itself differently with Logan, Joe, and Tea Cake. In her first marriage to Logan Killicks, Janie has her idea of what a marriage should look like shattered, as she failed to fall into the romantic idea of love that she held dear (Myth and Violence in Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God). In her second marriage, to Joe “Jody” Starks, Janie buried her fight and spirit within herself, as she attempted to fit into the mold of the “perfect wife” Joe imagined (In Search Of Janie). Finally, in her marriage to Tea Cake, she feels the love she has longed for, and is accepted as the strong, independent woman she is (Janie Crawford Character Analysis). In every marriage, Janie feels the various effects of each man, as they either encourage or diminish her voice and inner spark.

African-American women, like mules, are property of men. They are treated without the proper human rights that should be placed on a woman doing so much for their men to survive. Janie represents black women's struggles, as her own struggle progresses in Jody's store. He buys her, through and similar to, his purchases of "new clothes of silk and wool" (33). When the two

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.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the protagonist, experiences relief at the end of the novel. The novel begins at the end, emphasizing the importance of her moral reconciliation. Though at the beginning, it appears she returns home defeated, it is contrary. She returns home triumphant in finding her peace and fulfillment. When Janie starts to take things into her own hands instead of relying on her faith of others, she finally finds herself and joy. She needed to experience love in her own way to find what she was missing and what she needed in her love and her life.

Janie spends her chore-time in the backyard garden admiring the pear tree and the glistening world of nature surrounding her with peace and tranquility. In Zora Neale Hurtson's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she accompanies a wide range of rhetorical devices such as onomatopoeia, simile, imagery, so on to visualize the world in Janie's eyes on her own home.

One of the primary themes in Their Eyes Were Watching God is the concept of dreams; how we try to reach them, and how we react when they cannot be reached. Not everyone is able to reach their dreams, so in the face of crushing disappointment, they must find a way to cope with desiring the unattainable. One of the possible ways to deal with this, and the method that Hurston develops, is the fashioning of words into weapons in order to handle cruel reality. However, as a long term solution words will only worsen the problem. Janie And Jody’s confrontation in the store reveals how words are weapons and coping mechanisms that prevent people from achieving their dreams.

Gender roles are also a huge aspect in her life. Janie is taught many lessons from her Nanny. One of the lessons Janie remembers is the pain and hardship Nanny was put through as a slave. Working all her life Nanny explains to Janie “ de nigger woman is de mule ud de world so fur as Ah can see” (Hurston 14). Although the role of men is to usually carry the load, Janie learns the women carry out the tough tasks. This statement shapes Janie because she realizes women are going to have to get down and dirty sometimes. Janie first realizes this as Logan’s wife. She is made to work in the fields and Logan plans on her working the plow before to long. Janie does not like that fact she is not being treated like a prized possession; however, she experiences the opposite effect as well. Janie faces an internal conflict about how to act when being forced to work with Logan. As stated in An Introduction to Fiction an internal conflict is a “central struggle between [a character and their own mind] in a story” (K+G 714). The relationship she has with Logan challenges her to find within herself to be subservient to someone else. After leaving Logan for Joe Starks, Janie becomes the mayor’s untouchable wife. Joe considers being a “mayor’s wife [as] something different…you ain’t goin’ off in all dat mess uh commonness” (Hurston 60). Now Janie holds a position beneath her husband. She is the mayor’s wife, which