Their Eyes Were Watching God Literary Analysis

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.

We see a lot of symbolism through the book, such as the gun used at the end of the book, and the pear tree. Towards the end of the chapter we see janie having to kill her only true love with a gun, it was a tough decision because in her eyes tea cake has shown her what true love really feels like. The gun symbolized how sometimes the tough decisions are the necessary ones. In the last chapter page 185 it states “It was the meanest moment of eternity. A minute before she was a scared human being fighting for its life. Now she was sacrificing self with Tea Cake’s head in her lap. She had wanted him to live so much and he was dead. No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep. Janie held his head tightly to her breast and wept and thanked him wordlessly for giving her the chance for loving service”. This is talking about how she had to kill her own true love because her own

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston revolves around the struggles of Janie Starks to find a certain form of love in a still much divided time in society. This essential theme of love is not actually brought out in full effect until the death of Janie’s second husband, Joe Starks. This death brings about the discovery of Tea Cake, a man who fulfills Janie’s views on love, via the compositions of springtime: bright skies, sunny days, and bugs flying around. It took Janie a constant search for this type of love, and after the death of Joe, she finally found it.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist Janie is on a quest throughout the novel because she overcomes difficulties in the form of social prejudice, sexism, and racism in order to achieve self-worth and self-knowledge. This directly corresponds with Foster’s criterion of the five essential components a quest involves.

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.

“She had waited all her life for something.” This quote is significant because it epitomizes the struggle of a woman to reach self-actualization. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston juxtaposes opposing places to emphasize the experience gained by the novel’s protagonist, Janie, in each respective location, and to emphasize the effect of that environment on Janie’s journey to attain her dreams. Through this comparison, the author explores the idea of living and experiencing life as a means of self-discovery. Moreover, Hurston expresses another theme central to the novel’s understanding. This particular theme denounces the belief that achieving life experience should always involve

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 Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston discusses the topic of women oppressed in marriage by exploring themes of arranged marriage, gender roles, and abuse. In the early 1900’s, marriage was seen as the way to gain protection and a purpose in life. For many young women, marriage meant that they would be seen as a cook, a maid, and a nanny. The protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Starks, is a young African American woman who recounts her marriages and young life to a friend. In her first marriage, we see how she is oppressed by her grandmother and her husband’s inability to love her. Joe, her second husband, resorted to physical violence and emotional abuse to control Janie. After Joe’s death, Janie is finally free to live her life as she chooses, and in that process, she meets Tea Cake, a charming young man whom she eventually marries. In that marriage, Tea Cake and Janie start strong and happy, their lives filled with love and joy. However, eventually, the influence of gender roles and possession that were common at that time took control of Tea Cake. Through reading about these experiences we explore the way she was treated in each of her marriages, how she was oppressed, and how she found freedom.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is set in the South during the early 1900s. Being shortly after the Civil War and yet before the Civil Rights movement, racism and prejudice run rampant throughout the countryside. Although slaves have been free for years, black people are still struggling to find their own place. They want to have a voice where they live, yet whites won’t let that happen. Women are still second-class citizens, with black women being the absolute lowest. At the same time, though, white and black men alike lust after black and mixed women for their features and the feeling of absolute control they experience being with them.

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

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.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford searches for self-knowledge and grows through her relationships with men, family, and society. As Janie progresses in the novel, she takes strides towards black culture, not away from it. Although Janie is the first female in African American fiction to embark on such a journey of self-realization and independence, she is caught in her innocence many times throughout the novel. Janie realizes she must find out who she is as a person before she becomes the subject of others. Janie innocently remarks, “Dey useter call me Alphabet ‘cause so many people had done named me different names.” The name Alphabet suits Janie as a character because she is indefinable

Their Eyes Were Watching God’s Close Analysis Zora Neal Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God discusses important aspects of the nature of identity in the form of the main character’s life. Janie, the protagonist, is a young woman who struggles on her path to find herself. From the time she was sixteen, her life had been defined by men and marriage. Each person she knew asserted themselves into her life as an asperous force that Janie defines herself by.