Their Eyes Were Watching God Literary Analysis

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 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 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 this book, Hurston writes in the dielect of the black community of the time. Many of the words are slang. Hurston begins the story with Janie telling it, but then it becomes a third person narrative throughout most of the story.

As shown in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, By starching and ironing her face during Jody’s funeral, Janie masks her true feelings behind the “wall of stone and steel” she built around her. Janie’s life has been miserable in her marriage with Jody. Believing that Jody would treat her as a real lady with wealth and respect, Janie decided to run away with him away from the horrible marriage she had with Logan Killicks. Janie saw Jody as her new chance for the idealized love she sought dearly for throughout the novel. Upon meeting one another for the first time, Jody seemed both passionate and graceful to Janie. He would call Janie beautiful and say that she deserved better than Logan. But as the two spend more time together

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.

The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on Janie’s life, and how her experiences change her perspectives on major ideas such as love, life, and happiness over the course of the story. Her three marriages, along with the boy that first sparked her interest in love, were particularly meaningful in relation to how they helped her realize exactly what those ideas meant to her, and not how other people think they should mean to her. Throughout her life, Janie struggled to accommodate what she wanted while also meeting other people’s expectations. As a result, she spent a great deal of her life longing for different lovers and more intimate connections than what she was dealt with. Janie overcomes this desire as she matures in the book, finally

In the book, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" the main conflict is shown through Janie's, the main character, quest for spiritual fulfillment and love. Janie clashes with the values that others imposed upon her. Throughout the book she is trying to find love. Love to Janie is not only physical passion but an emotional connection, like the bumble bee and the pear tree, she sat under as a child. Zora Neale Hurston represents this through Janie's three marriages in this book.

Realism, a literary movement that depicts hard aspects of life, may or may not have much meaning when used. Instead of focusing on the supernatural and reversion to form as naturalism does, realism concentrates on what is actually occurring in the story and its real effects. Throughout Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, realism is used by the author to explicitly show the reader what is going on. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Hurston’s use of realism includes scenes in the novel when Leafy was raped by her school teacher, when Jody hit Janie, and when the floodgates of Lake Okeechobee burst open.

In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching god, by Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston uses different stylistic techniques to help speak about both the reflection and departure from the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston's writing can be shown to reflect the Harlem Renaissance because Janie Crawford, the main character in Hurston's novel, is trying to search for her true identity in life going through different aspects of relationship problems leading up to what determines her strive to be the woman she has grown up to be. Hurston uses different dialectical situations including male dominance and self-discovery to assist. There were many examples of being a departure of Harlem Renaissance when a specific action took place during the novel including

Zora Neale Hurston composed a classic African American love story entitled “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in 1937. Throughout the novel, Janie gets married three times in hopes of finding the contentment she has been searching for. The failure of her first two marriages lead her to the next as they consist of her spending her days laboring and being dominated by men. Her time with Logan Killicks and Joe Starks helps Janie realize that love does not automatically come from marriage, but Tea Cake shows her what true love is. After spending years seeking inner happiness and serenity, Janie at last endures the bliss of life she has always hoped for.

When reading this book, I couldn’t help but compare it to others with similar themes that I’ve read during my high school career. One book in particular that I remember would be the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurst. I read this senior year and both books had very similar themes and strong female characters. The main character Janie, thoroughly develops throughout the entire book through the different men and life experiences she goes through. This is just like Maya as she goes through her life!

In Their Eyes Were watching God, the author, Hurston, is following the lifetime of Janie Crawford. Janie is a freelance girl who is telling her chronicle to her kissing friend, Pheobe. Janie’s conception was a result of Leafy, Janie’s mother, being raped by her school teacher as a young girl. Therefore Janie wasn’t destined to possess a beautiful life. Being as though her mother abandoned her, she was raised by her grandparent, Nanny, and her boss Mrs. Washburn. Since she was raised by them she never had to work as a result of everything was handed to her. Throughout the book Janie goes through 2 marriages, each teaching her one thing new on the way, before finding true love within the third and fulfilling her romantic dream. Although the journey

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 French philosopher Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws: “There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”. With this quote, I think what was implied is that since laws aren’t typically questioned or easily changed, if it is immoral then it will continue to oppress and be thought of as normal for long periods of time. This idea is shown all throughout Their Eyes Were watching God, in fact I think that some of the themes in the book are directly connected to oppressive laws and unfair advantages of some races over the other. There’s lots of examples of racism, inequality, and flawed systems shown in the book that are all still very relevant in America today.