Literary Analysis Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed. Things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches”(pg 8). At the beginning of the book, the main character(Janie) is greeted by her best friend at her house. Her curious friend asked Janie what did she do while she was away.

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston traces Janie’s quest for independence and the search of her self-confidence through events that happened before and after her epiphany immediately following Joe’s death. Throughout the novel Janie’s view of life, her independence, and her view of love changed exceedingly depending on who she was married to. This story centers around an important epiphany that Janie has when Joe dies; that personal discoveries and life experiences help people find themselves. Before her revelation, when Janie is 16 years old, she experiences a moment of realization in she discovers new-found feelings about love, marriage, . Under the pear-tree, she has a perfect moment in nature, full of passion

Their Eyes were Watching God features Janie, the main character, narrating her life and her growth through the form of storytelling. The author masterfully crafts the piece so that Phoeby and the audience learn of Janie’s hardships and struggles and, as a result, the reader learns about the complications within the relationship between Janie and Joe that culminate into one single paragraph. In Their Eyes were Watching God, the author Zora Hurston uses a plethora of literary devices, including similes, metaphors, and personification, to help develop the main character Janie and on a larger, more universal scale, express the idea that male dominance over females is detrimental for women, as shown by the negative effects on Janie caused by Joe. First, Hurston uses personification to develop the main character Janie. When Hurston writes “The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face.

In "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston. Writes a novel were Janie, the main character, finds herself into two unpredictable marriages. Were one was give and the other was chosen. Nevertheless, Janie is unable to find her true love, which cause her to fail on understanding the idealistic reality of marriage.

In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie Crawford has two marriages, one that she is forced into by her grandmother, and the other her own choice. Both marriages end up showing that Janie is unable to have a husband so far that suits her,maven if she chooses them for herself. This would imply to most people that she's a poor judge in character, but being fair, one of the marriages she couldn't get out of, and the other had the groom charm her into going with him. Both husbands end up eventually making her fairly unhappy in different ways. Logan Killicks, Janie's first husband, is a self proclaimed hard working man who despises what he perceives as laziness.

Love is a mystery for many people, everyone has their views on what love should be and it is way more than just a definition in a dictionary. Love takes patience and time and not just forcing to find it. In the story, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurstone, the main character Janie Crawford is raised by her grandmother who forces her to marry an older wealthy man. Janie 's realizes that isn’t what true love is and runs off with another man called Jodie. After many years she realizes that marriage didn’t work out either, after Jodies dies she meets a man called TeaCake who she falls for and runs away with.

At first, he started off as a loving husband who really, just gave up not even a year into the marriage because he saw her as lazy. “Long before the year was up, Janie noticed her husband had stopped talking in rhymes to her. He had ceased to wonder at her long black hair and finger it.” (Ch 2. P. 26)

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, often focuses her attention on nature and makes many comparisons of situations in her life to things, such as pollen and a pear tree, in nature; the nature comparisons reveal her love-centered nature and her hopeful visions in the future for a love-filled life. During the early years of Janie’s life, she often sees situations in a way related to nature, as a child this reveals her love-centered nature. One day while her grandmother is sleeping, she goes outside to lie “beneath the pear tree[,] soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees”(Hurston 13), and while she was out there, her mind drifted to thoughts of love. Although the pear tree is mentioned

The departure is when the protagonist is separated from the known and steps into the unknown. Janie Crawford is a 16- year- old girl living with her grandmother that is forced to transition her lifestyle to another. Her grandmother is very firm and distinctive on pressuring Janie to marry at a young age. Janie feels she is not ready, but she knows she wants to experience the love so the feeling of curiosity motivates her to agree with her grandmother's choice.

Janie even marries Logan Killicks, a man of stability, much to her grandmother’s own arrangement. With Janie newly married to Logan, the reader can even see that Janie values stability and a man that will take care of her. Much of this value Janie places in a steady marriage stems from her grandmother’s belief that it is better to marry a man who will treat a woman with some decency than purely off of what one believes is love. Janie’s marriage to Logan even brings Janie to a realization that she does not truly love Logan. Hurston writes, “She knew now that marriage did not make love.

After leaving Logan and marrying Joe, she was very happy and seemed to be in love but soon after becomes a “trophy wife” and was just going through the motions of marriage. “No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some… She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value”(Huston, 76). At this point Janie had fully accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to have love in her marriage, and didn’t really care. At this point Janie’s character starts to develope into a more independent woman who cared less about what he husband wanted and more about what she wanted.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is repressed because she is a colored woman. She is looked down on from the eyes of the men in her life, especially her husbands. At the same time, she must deal with racism because she is a black woman. Her Nanny’s view of race also affects Janie’s life. Janie’s gender had a bigger impact on her life than the fact that she is black.

Written by Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, follows a young woman named Janie Crawford and her coming of age story. The novel is introduced with Janie returning back to Eatonville after the passing of her husband Tea Cake. In the opening scene, Janie opens up to her friend Pheoby and tells her how things have been since she had left with Tea cake two years ago. However, Phoebe doesn't understand the story Janie is trying to tell her because she incorporates events from when her grandmother was around thus confusing her friend.

The growing influence of the post-colonial agenda since the 1980‟s has resulted in the creative expression of voice which was till now silenced by the Western master narratives. The painstaking efforts of non-white women from the margins has brought cross-cultural and interracial discussions into the arena of academic feminist theorizing which was till now based on gender. One of the primary aims of third-world feminism was to reject homogenizing impulses of Western feminists who analyzed women issues purely with regard to gender. The prominent black theoretician Bell Hooks criticizes her contemporarian Betty Friedman (whose book The Feminine Mystique had became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement) for giving only a one-dimensional

One of the universal themes of literature is the idea that children suffer because of the mistakes of an earlier generation. The novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" follows the story of Janie Mae Crawford through her childhood, her turbulent and passionate relationships, and her rejection of the status quo and through correlation of Nanny 's life and Janie 's problems, Hurston develops the theme of children 's tribulations stemming from the teachings and thoughts of an earlier generation. Nanny made a fatal mistake in forcibly pushing her own conclusions about life, based primarily on her own experiences, onto her granddaughter Janie and the cost of the mistake was negatively affecting her relationship with Janie. Nanny lived a hard life and she made a rough conclusion about how to survive in the world for her granddaughter, provoked by fear. " Ah can’t die easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit cup outa you: Have some sympathy fuh me.