Their Eyes Were Watching God Character Analysis

Connecting Hurston life to the novel

While Their Eyes Were Watching God is a work of fiction, it has been considered autobiographical as well. Hurston reveals her personality through the interaction of the author’s, protagonist’s, narrator’s voices and through the narrative events. Hurston’s father has been lodged in many characteristics of Jody Stark. Like Jody, her father moved to a solely black town called Eatonville as in the novel. Her father John Hurston was also noted for “being very ambitious, hard-headed and having a prominent position of carpenter as well being a Baptist preacher and attaining a position of power within the South Florida Baptist Association”. (Robert 5) Like Jody, he sought out to be a leader within the fledgling community of Eatonville Janie similarly shares many characteristics with Hurston. One of

On her autobiography, she recalls that she "used to climb to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our front gate and look out over the world. The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon". (Hurston 44) This parallels when Janie is sixteen and "searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps". This instinctive curiosity is deceptive in both Hurston and Janie from an early stage and begins looking for that “horizon” throughout her life’s journey. In the novel, it ends when Janie pulls "in her horizon like a great fish-net"(Hurston 193). The horizon is not in front of her instead but around her. This novel also “signifies” upon feminine images in nineteenth-century narratives written by African American women. (woolflm 4) Consequently, it delivers a significant connection between those earlier narratives and novels written by African American women in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Contrasting literary forebear such as “W. Harper, Frances E, and Pauline Hopkins, Hurston rejected to stereotype her protagonist or to imitate to earlier