Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston: An Analysis

In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston describes the horizon as possibilities and opportunities. When the story starts out Janie’s perception of the horizon changes first from desire for love to the need of love, and ultimately the feeling of contentment towards love to show Janie maturing throughout the novel.

Throughout the novel, Janie grows from having everyone telling her what to do, to standing up for herself, and doing what was best for herself in the end. In the Novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie did as her Nanny told her to do not having a second opinion about it. Eventually she stood up for herself when she yelled at Joe on his deathbed. She takes charge of her life completely when she is forced to shoot Tea Cake. Janie moves from being a passive character to taking charge of her life completely.

“You got tuh go there tuh know there,” Janie, the main character of Their Eyes were Watching God written by Zora Neale Hurston says as she reflects on her life and what had brought her to her point of self actualization. Janie takes a long journey with many different people on the way helping her self-actualize. Achieving self-actualization came from fulfilling her talents and potentials with the help of others. On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, self-actualization is considered as the achievement that all people should strive, but they must pass through the basic needs in order to achieve the one goal, which is self actualization. Janie’s life throughout this book progressed like a ladder climbing through Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs to achieve

All novels contain symbolism in one shape or form, masking a deeper meaning beneath the words that are written on the page. Usually, there is an assortment of symbols disguised by a literal meaning that blend in with the scene. Symbols frequently come in the form of nature. Nature, generally being in the background of a scene, becomes more prominent when it is meant to be identified as a symbol. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the symbolism in nature is recurrent throughout the novel. It is used to indicate turning points and track the growth of the main character, Janie’s, coming-of-age. This is portrayed through the changing of the seasons and various correspondents. In this way, it can be seen that not all events affect Janie in the same way, leading her in one direction. In Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, seasonal symbols are used to target experiences in Janie’s life and how they affect her overall development into adulthood.

The book opens with Janie returning to Eatonville, after Tea Cake’s death. She walks down the street wearing the same overalls she wore while she was working with Tea Cake, causing many of the town’s residents to wonder about her. When confronted about this gossip, Janie proclaims, “if God don’t think no mo’ ‘bout ‘em then Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass” (5). She means that if God cared about the townspeople as little as she did, they would get lost amongst all the other things God likely does not care about. This shows how little she minds what other people think of her, and how her quest for self determination has been

In The Novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie does find herself at the end of the novel. Zora Neale Hurston displays this perfectly, with all the conflicts and struggles going on she finds her way to her true voice. All the husbands she has gone through, and what she has experienced. Hurston effectively shows Janie’s victory over oppression throughout the book. She has allowed to use her language as power, and use that power to grow into what she is at the end of the book. This movement allows her the opportunity to explore and form her ideas and voice in solitude. These external variables cause her to look inward and not depend on others as a source of survival. When she finally comes to terms with her influence, she stops fleeing. She

“Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.” In Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the main protagonist, Janie, lives a heck of a life. She comes in contact with a slew of characters that add, take away, and foreshadow something about her life. In the end, it was the people in her life who took her to the horizon and back. The folklore present in this book often traces the sun and the moon in an unending dance, as the folk stories of Zora’s time often did. Not only did Hurston use the cycles of the sun and moon, she takes it a step further and cycles the characters too, like the new day, with new things to offer. In this essay, I will be examining how Nanny and Logan

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God focusing on Janie’s personal growth through the trials and relationships throughout her life. “She recognizes that she has lived her life for everyone else and now that she is about to be free for the first time in her life,

In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie compares Joe to Abraham Lincoln because he freed the mule just as Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. While comparing him to President Lincoln, she says “. . . and dat makes you lak uh king uh something” (58) and this quote shows how Joe is seen by Janie and the people of Eatonville. He is seen as a king with the power to control everyone but instead of king, his title is Mayor of Eatonville. When Joe died, Janie stated that “Dis sittin’ in de rulin’ chair is been hard on Jody” (87) and his position of power finally caused him to collapse. The chair was his throne and he was on the throne as Mayor of Eatonville.His his reign eventually came to an end and it became too much for him.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book by influential author Zora Neale Hurston, is about the life of an African American woman named Janie and the effect relationships have on her freedom. Janie's freedom is constantly limited by the men in her three marriages, but through these relationships she learns how to be free through independence. Although Logan, Jody and Tea Cake all treated her very differently, they all placed some sort of emotional, physical, or social limit on her freedom.

Hurston suggests, "She searched as much of the world she could and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made" (11). Peeking into the horizon, Janie awaits impertinently for someone to appear. Janie unexpectedly detects, " a glorious being coming up the road" (11). This being is Johnny Taylor. Johnny approaches Janie and gives her a kiss, illustrating Janie’s first steps in her search for love and happiness. A lover who comes from the horizon hypnotizes Janie. Janie makes her first steps towards becoming a woman. Hurston affirms this idea, stating that the kiss marks, "the end of her childhood" (12). Hurston introduces Janie as a character who searches for love and will always be aware of love on the horizon.

Molly Johnson English 12E TEWWG Journal Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston Narrator/Narrative Voice • Third person narrator Setting (Time, Place) • Eatonville • The town in the beginning of the novel • Janie’s hometown • Everglades • The place where Janie and Tea Cake move to shortly after they get married Characters • Janie Crawford (Starks) – The protagonist of the novel. An attractive black woman with Caucasian features who returns to her hometown after disappearing for some time.

Janie reaches far to gain this horizon she seeks, enduring bad marriages and suppression via her Nanny and first two husbands all to reach her end goal. Janie finds true love in Teacake, her final husband and realizes love means knowing when to let go of your beloved. When Janie sees it necessary to shoot her husband to relieve him of his agony, she readily pulls the trigger, knowing her husband’s best interests. In the concluding paragraphs Janie “pulled in her horizons like a great fish-net…and draped it over her shoulders,” (Hurston 193) able to rest peacefully knowing she lived her life to its fullest capacity. This metaphor paints the reader a picture of brightly colored horizons stretching just beyond reach, and how Janie, through perseverance and her strong spirit could pull in her horizons, just as every person in society strives to do.

Towards the beginning of the story, Janie had been laying underneath a pear tree when “she saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation”(Hurston 28). What was described in this quote is one of many examples throughout the book that show a significant point of Janie’s life very symbolically. Hurston uses a symbol of a bee pollinating a flower as Janie growing up from a kid to a young adult. This symbol is brought up consistently throughout the novel because it symbolizes Janie’s outlooks on life as well as her growing as a person. Janie first see’s the bees and the blossom nin this quotation which is where her development began, and each time she encounters someone or something that contributes to her development this same symbol of bees and blossoms is brought up.. Hurston uses the literary device of imagery in this quote to go about describing the pollination of the tree in great detail using phrases such as “sink into the sanctum” and “Creaming every blossom”. Hurston’s choice to include such a great amount of imagery makes the reader think and become intrigued in what she

Janie's flashback ends, and the novel returns to Janie's conversation with Pheoby that began in Chapter 1. It is almost as if Janie's life story could serve as a lesson both to her dear friend, Pheoby and to the readers of the novel. In her journey through life, Janie has learned two important lessons: People must "go tuh God," and they must "find out about livin' fuh theyselves." Although Janie has lost Tea Cake she remembers the good times with him. Even kept seeds he was planning to plant that she will put in her garden as a reminder of him. At the end of the book, it is also shown that being by yourself is okay that you can be strong on your own. Zora Neale Hurston shows us in the resolution of the plot that even though women are looked