Zora Neale Hurston Character Analysis

In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie, the protagonist, tells the story of her ascension to adulthood and several of the lessons she learned along the way. Though married three times, her second marriage to Joe Starks had the most formative impact on her transition to maturity. Given that Joe played such a crucial role in this affair, we can classify him as a type of parent to Janie. Later, after her final marriage, Janie reflects on her life and is at peace. By that point, she came to realize how to be truly happy.

Hurston harnesses juxtaposition to distinguish between the situations of white folk and black folk experiences, as the differences between the two display Janie’s personal growth even more. After the failures between Logan and Janie’s marriage, Janie was ready to embark on new adventures independently. Janie now realizes she wants to find true love instead a forced love that follows how her grandmother’s outdated beliefs. When Janie was free of her abuser, the transition in her life was expressed by, “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman,” indicating the mental development of maturity in Janie (25).

Zora Neale Hurston’s use of language in her short story Spunk allows the reader to become part of the community in which this story takes place. The story is told from the point of view of the characters, and Hurston writes the dialogue in their broken English dialect. Although the language is somewhat difficult to understand initially, it adds to the mystique of the story. Spunk is a story about a man that steals another man’s wife, kills the woman’s husband and then he ends up dying from an accident at the saw mill. Spunk believed that it was Lena’s husband, Joe Kanty, who shoved him into the circular saw, and the people in the village agreed that Joe Kanty had come back to get revenge. The language used by the characters helps to

Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the most unsurpassed writers of twentieth-century African-American literature. Published in 1937, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God depicts the life of Janie Crawford, an African-American woman, who is in search of true love and ultimately her true self. In the novel, Janie shows us that love comes in all shapes and forms, and love is different with each person you choose to love. In the opening of the novel, Hurston uses a metaphor to say that, while men can never reach for their dreams, women can direct their wills and chase their dreams. Hurston uses this metaphor to make a distinction of men and women gender roles, and Janie went against the norms that were expected of her.

Zora Neale Hurston's “Their Eyes Were Watching God” follows Jamie Crawford who consecutively becomes involved in three marriages with distinct men that she eventually leaves, but not without finding a semblance of her identity through them. Janie’s ability to seek out her dreams and her persistence towards discovering not only love, but herself through relationships portrays her as a peculiar individual who defies the social norm of the time period where a woman, especially black women, should not have a voice. The confounding qualities Janie emits prompts for an in-depth study on how Hurston develops the growth of a black woman’s personal autonomy in a highly oppressive setting.

Taking place in the 1920’s, Harlem Renaissance was a period of time where cultural, social, and artistic expansion took place in the American society. Hurston’s uniqueness led her to write about the problems of individuals, particularly white ones and black ones. In her own words, she stated, “Many Negroes criticise my book, because I did not make it a lecture on the race problem. I have ceased to think in terms of race; I think only in terms of individuals. I am interested in you now, not as a Negro man but as a man” (“Although her reputation”). In addition, Hurston portrayed the lives of black people as constantly miserable, downtrodden and deprived. For instance, in Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie Crawford, finds her second husband, Joe Starks, only to mislead her life. Janie figures out that she once again lacks the love she had longed for. Joe considered Janie to be his possession. He expected Janie to be a well-behaved wife, who would not speak up for herself or disobey him. He additionally expected her to follow every order he had for her, such as forbidding her to interact and play checkers with people (“The most prevalent”). During this time, men were showing off their masculinity by ordering their wives around and ruling over them. However, Janie refused to accept herself to be oppressed, rather “outspoken and headstrong” (Zora Neale Hurston’s). Hurston is trying to portray that women should have the courage to speak up for

Zora Neale Hurston had an intriguing life, from surviving a hurricane in the Bahamas to having an affair with a man twenty years her junior. She used these experiences to write a bildungsroman novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, about the colorful life of Janie Mae Crawford. Though the book is guised as a quest for love, the dialogues between the characters demonstrate that it is actually about Janie’s journey to learn how to not adhere to societal expectation.

The story, “Spunk”, written by Zora Neale Hurston contains many characters but there’s only one that I find to be very interesting and amazing. The story revolves around the Civil Rights time which was around the time that Ms. Zora grew up and joined the Civil rights movement and became an author and folklorist. Within her story, “Spunk,” the character, Joe Kanty is a very loving, kindhearted man; even though, his character transitions within the story which means that it changes, plenty of dialogue. Three character traits that determines Joe’s character would be loving, fearless, and determined.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she sets the protagonist, Janie Mae Crawford as a woman who wants to find true love and who is struggling to find her identity. To find her identity and true love it takes her three marriages to go through. While being married to three different men who each have different philosophies, Janie comes to understand that she is developed into a strong woman. Hurston makes each idea through each man’s view of Janie, and their relationship with the society. The lifestyle with little hope of or reason to hope for improvement. He holds a sizeable amount of land, but the couple's life involves little interaction with anyone else.

After recently read a short story titled “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston about two men fighting for the woman that they love. Some stories end in happily ever after, but others end up in a tragic, like “Spunk”, one may say “fight for the person that you love”. In this story the two main characters are Spunk and Joe, they are both in love with the same woman, Lena. Spunk has a physical appearance that makes the village afraid of him, including Joe. Joe is married to Lena, but spunk wants her as well. Joe was shot after he took someone’s advice that he should go after Lena, which he did and for that advice caused his death. Spunk thought he

Zora Neale Hurston was an influential African-American novelist who emerged during the Harlem Renaissance. (Tow 1) During the Harlem Renaissance Hurston’s novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God, was written in southern dialect so that the African American audience can relate, mainly because Hurston could only write about what she knew. “In the case of Hurston, dialect, as a regional vernacular, can and does contain subject, experience emotion and revelation.” (Jones 4) when Hurston's novel first was released many people didn't not accept the writing for what it really was. “When Their Eyes Were Watching God first appeared in 1937, it was well-received by white critics as an intimate portrait of southern blacks, but African-American reviewers rejected the novel. (Telgen, Hile 1) In this modern day the novel is well accepted and has been called "a classic of black literature, one of the best novels of the period" (Howard 7) In "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Janie takes on a journey in search of her own identity where each of her three husbands plays an important role in her discovery of who she is.

In Zora Neal Hurston’s novel, the story is about An African-American woman named Janie Crawford. The book was set in the 20th century in central and southern Florida. The story shows her journey through life and the obstacles she faces along the way. Janie goes through four men in her life, each leading her closer to discovering herself. The novel begins as Janie returns to her hometown Eatonville, Florida. It has been two years since Janie left and this makes her neighbors question her. The last memory of Janie was her leaving in a wedding dress. Her returning in dirty overalls makes her town wonder what happened while she was gone. Virginia Heffernan states that the story, “…Opens with Janie

Throughout a fair part of Zora Neal Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s low class create problems when it comes to men. She lives with men she does not love because they give her the financial stability she cannot have yet on her own. Janie marries Logan Killicks at a young age even though she does not want to

The short story, “Spunk”, written in 1920 by famous author, Zora Neale Hurston of Eatonville, FL, contains many characters but there’s only one that I find to be very amazing, Mr. Joe Kanty. A member of the Harlem Renaissance, author and folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston, constructed many of her works like: “The Gilded Six-Bits”, “Spunk”, and “Their Eyes were watching God,” during the Civil Rights movement to help fuel the setting and purpose of her stories. In the short story, “Spunk”, Mr. Joe’s characters’ transitions or changes to help portray the hero and bravery him. Three character traits that determine Joe’s behavior or inner self throughout the story relates from him being loving and fearful to him becoming revengeful.

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891 in Alabama. She is known to be one of the most influential novelist of the twentieth century in African America literature. Hurston is described to be a very opinionated woman that stood for what she believed in; which reflected in some of her works. In addition to her many titles such as, being an anthropologist and short story writer, she was closely related and heavily focused on the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston and her political opinions placed her at odds with important figures during that time which I wholeheartedly believe played a part in the undeniable attraction that most people have towards her works. Being that Hurston was such a unique writer, to understand the ethics and themes of her and how she contributed to African American literature comes with an understanding of the background and childhood she had.