Their Eyes Were Watching God Freedom Quotes

Janie Crawford is surrounded by outward influences that contradict her independence and personal development. These outward influences from society, her grandma, and even significant others contribute to her curiosity. Tension builds between outward conformity and inward questioning, allowing Zora Neal Hurston to illustrate the challenge of choice and accountability that Janie faces throughout the novel.

In order to answer the question of what is required for an individual as he exists in society to be free, we must first understand what freedom is. In synthesizing ideas from the texts studied this semester, thus far, I have arrived at the conclusion that freedom can be described as the ability to pursue activities that fulfill oneself, and contribute to our own happiness, and self-actualization as an individual. To say that freedom can be “defined” would imply placing limits on freedom, and would be counterintuitive. Erich Fromm states that “[Freedom’s] meaning changes according to the degree of man’s awareness and conception of himself as an independent and separate being (23).” The less a person is bound to obligations albeit moral, economic, social, or political, and more self-actualized, the more likely he will be to seek happiness through activities that are free from influence of these aforementioned entities.

She learns to control her voice after she finds it. Similarly, the narrator is silent in exposed places, neither revealing why Janie isn’t upset with Tea Cake’s beating nor disclosing her words at the trial. Although Janie returns to Eatonville alone, she returns as a strong, new woman. Hurston’s narrative advocates both freedom from sexist and racist harassment, and the rejection of community and cultural values that enforce such harassment. Hurston also presents an imaginative consciousness that speaks of wandering and independence in a time when women were somewhat restricted. In the end, Janie, like Hurston and many African American women of the twentieth century, becomes a woman who can think and act for herself.

Dracula and The Autobiography of Malcolm X both have different versions of freedom. They speak on how the mind can be controlled. Dr. John "Jack" Seward, a psychologist, talks about his patient. His patient is very well under some sort of imprisonment

Janie, as she is sitting under a blossoming pear tree, realizes that the entire natural world is marrying and giving itself in marriage. To Janie, marriage is synonymous with love. The incredibly extended metaphor of marriage and the natural world is the metaphor that the whole book is focused upon. As Janie is the main character, it shows that this love, this marriage, will also play deeply into Janie’s life. Through Hurston’s figurative language, Janie’s character is developed quite rapidly. The reader begins to realize that to Janie, nothing but marriage, and therefore love, matters to her. Through the extended metaphor that Janie speaks and is describing clues the reader into the fact that, while Janie has many, many other characteristics about her, her deep desire to love and be loved is really what makes Janie such a real character. Hurston doesn’t contain her use of figurative language to just one character, though. Both Janie’s second husband, Joe, and her third husband, Tea Cake, have an impressive amount of figurative language used to make them come alive. While Hurston doesn’t employ the same type of

Through images of Janie’s face and her clenched teeth, Hurston displays the will to fight slowly disappearing after one has been pushed for a long time in order to express the effect of oppression on a person. The internal fight of submission that occurs within Janie and the choice of whether or not to voice her opinion causes her to question Joe and what was really between them. Following years of conflict within herself and with her husband, Joe, Janie surrenders the fight to finding her voice. “So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush”(71). The use of the word “gradually” in the citation reveals that becoming silent for Joe’s sake was a slow process for Janie. Since Joe was able to back Janie into this corner and

Freedom is something that we struggle to strive since the day we step into this world. We can see in this book All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr that most of the characters are experiencing a common struggle is the ability to be free. One of the characters that I connect mostly with is Werner. Werner as an orphan while living in Hitler’s times his life, opportunities, and choices were limited.

Hurston uses the actions of characters to establish the theme that one person cannot completely diminish another’s free will. Joe wanting to control Janie creates a battle against her desire for free will and a life created through her own decisions. For example, Joe shows his need to control Janie as he “ordered Janie to tie up her hair around the store” (Hurston 55). Joe is a very powerful man, even in the eyes of his own wife. He forces Janie to wear hair ties around the store against her own free will. This shows his initial need to overpower and control Janie extinguishing her free will. However, Janie’s free will eventually reigns victorious over Joe’s free will as he becomes very sick and less powerful. As his

In the chapter there are a lot of connections between the main text and the philosophical lessons. The philosophical lessons are about fate. “Fatalism is the belief that whatever happens is predestined. ”(Page 54) In other words, everything happens for a reason. The Greeks even believed that even “world history was governed by Fate, and that the fortunes of war could be swayed by the intervention of Gods.

The novel can be explains as Janie's attempt to find voices, that can speak for her. The conflict of being silenced by another is most illustrated in a relationship between Janie and her husband Jody. Janie leaves Jody because he wont listen to her. As you can see as Jody's power gets bigger and bigger, he forbids her to talk , Janie's silence increases power. This silence function has the process of gaining self awareness for Janie.

While reading through the book Specials, this text really caught my eye, relating to freedom in today’s society:

Jean Jacques Rousseau stated that: “man is born free; but everywhere he lives in chains”. This suggests humankind is only free at the moment of birth and thereafter they live their lives chained down by forces working to hold them back from being who they truly are. Every man and women are shaped not by their freedoms, but by their limitations. This is evident in all types of literature and from observation of the world we live in now. However, I have chosen to analyze Prince Hamlet in Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Winston Smith in 1984 by George Orwell and lastly The Man in The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

In the western world we have an innumerable amount of privileges and beneficial effects, which gives us a set of outstanding and exclusive options, that should not lightly be taken for granted. We are liberated and emancipated from the chains of indigence, which so many other countries in the east are bound of, consequently that means we are free to choose our own identity, our education and what we want to occupy ourselves with, our freedom of speech and in the light of that we are free to pursue our dreams and fulfill them. Or are we actually completely free? In the short story “A Gap of Sky” written by Anna Hope in 2008, the main character, Ellie, illustrates the abstract term of freedom and how it can be interpreted.

Freedom means opportunity. Opportunity to speak, have political or national independence and be the person you are. While many butterflies are free to spread their wings, many others suffer in captivity, which only can dream about how a life with freedom feels like. In the short story ‘’Sorry for the Loss’’ 2008 by Bridget Keehan, light I shed on yearning for freedom. This is depicted in the contrast of the two characters that we meet: young and criminal Victor and chaplain Evie. Things are about to chance, when she visits Victor at the prison to tell him the bad news.

The issue of the forms of gender restrictions that are imposed on females and how they determine every facet of their existence -for what they endure can not be rightfully called a life- are obviously a major concern to Hurston in her novel. This is clear in every aspect of the novel such as the characters, setting, events, and dialogues, and the different stories that are narrated for in each of them Hurston "incorporates many elements that comment upon socially expected roles of men and women" (Jones 197). Each character in the novel portrays the limitations that women must accept because they are not born as men so they must suffer. Beginning with Janie' grandmother who attempts to force her beliefs in the rightful place of women,