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

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly." These dream quotes came from the one and only "Their eyes were watching God," book by Zora Neale Hurston. Mrs. Zora Neale Hurston was an expert in writing in dialect. This unique literary form creates differences between other novels or storybooks. In this book, various events (to be specific, a death) seem to illuminate the meaning of life as a whole.

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.

Hurston chose to tell the story within a framework to give Janie a voice in the novel while she used an omniscient narrator to establish a voice outside of Janie, while continuing in the style of Janie's voice, to cease the need to stay in the vernacular dialogue full

Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston deviates from the conventions of harlem renaissance by adding personality to the novel, utilizing factual accounts to tell the fictional events of a story, and compiling a story about suffrage rather than race.

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.

“Ships at distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others, they sail farever on the horizon…” (Hurston 1). The opening sentence of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, translates into that people are always viewing their dreams from far. Some are able to their goals and others are left only thinking about them. The protagonist of the novel, Janie, spends the expanse of her life searching to find her true self. Along her journey, Janie meets Tea Cake, a man whose love guides her to her voice. The complexity of their relationship is shown through their passionate, yet doubting love.

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, written in 1937, is about a African american girl named Janie Crawford who grew up in a white household. Through her transition to womanhood she wanted to experience true love, which set her on a quest to do so. Her grandmother arranged a marriage for her, which Janie wasn't so happy about. The story follows her growing as a person and her many experiences with her marriages. Each impacting her emotionally and making her the woman she becomes at the end of the book. Towards the ending of her book, after being harmed emotionally, and sometimes physically by her past husbands she meets a man named Tea Cake, much younger than her. She fell in love with him and

In the production of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Oprah Winfrey transforms the work of Zora Neale Hurston, creating many differences from the novel. By altering the overall focus along with Janie’s relationships, depleting all of the rhetorical devices, and changing the characteristics of the town of Eatonville, Winfrey creates an opposition between the plot of the book and movie. The diverse side of Oprah’s interpretation causes the contrast of her ideas and Hurston’s.

Love can appear out of nowhere.In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, She introduces us to Janie a mixed woman who struggles with finding her vision of love. When she meets her later husband Teacake we see that her vision of love is slowly coming true. Hurston uses the relationship Janie has with Teacake to show that Janie found the love she envisioned when she was a child.

Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God explains the journey of Janie Crawford’s life. Janie experiences abuse, sacrifice, and true love throughout different situations in the book. As she goes through each circumstance of life, Janie gains confidence and courage that she does not have in the beginning of the story. Janie’s chief accomplishments in the book are finding freedom and independence despite the situations in which she has to overcome loss and disaster, has to prove her worth to a man, and has to learn to value and accept herself.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, authored by Zora Neal Hurston, tells the story of an African American woman named Janie living in the 1900s who spends her life trying to find self-fulfillment through love. She marries two men before she finds her one true love. Hurston uses symbols such as the pear tree and the horizon, Janie’s hair, and the hurricane to define Janie. Judgment is also a reoccurring element used by Hurston to show Janie's quest for love and the independence that she gains in her journey. Throughout her life, Janie also has to fight the stereotypical role that is expected of her by other people.

In a marriage, the two people involved are supposed to trust each other and each bring something equal to the table. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford, a southern black woman living in the early 20th century and protagonist of the story, has trouble finding her perfect person throughout her life and her whopping three marriages for her time. Janie was first forced into marrying Logan Killicks by her grandmother. Soon after marrying Logan, she ran away with a stranger titled Joe Starks, her marriage to Joe being the longest of the three. After Joe died, an older Janie started to see, and eventually married, a younger man, Vergible Woods who was most commonly referred to as Tea Cake.

Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a work of fiction based upon true events of her childhood (Jones). The novel was written in just seven short weeks, and is set in early twentieth century Florida. Throughout the novel, Janie Crawford embarks on a quest for love that comes to dominate her life, allowing Janie to persevere through the judgement of others and become a self-actualized woman in a time when African-American women were the “mules” of society (Hurston 14).

Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel that appears simple to many, but is actually pretty deep the more you really think about it. It is a book that has plot elements that can be analyzed for days on end, whether we’re talking about the use of dialect, the deferment from the Harlem Renaissance, or the poetic language of the novel. However, there is one theme in the book that is very prevalent. Probably due to the fact that it’s the main plot of the story. Throughout the story, Janie marries 3 people.