Summary:
"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston is an amazing novel. It is a fictional novel with realistic experiences of Blacks. The theme of this book is: stand up for yourself, or life and all that's in it will run over you. In the beginning there was a prime person who ran over Janie, that is her husband Joe.
"Love is a flower of life"
German Poet
"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston is an amazing novel. It is a fictional novel with realistic experiences of Blacks. This novel has 19 chapters (193 pages) and is not part of a series. The novel begins on a porch, in Eatonville, FL around the 1930's, with the main character Janie telling her story to her best friend Phoebe. Nanny is her grandmother, Logan is the first and oldest man who married her. Joe is the second man who married her and Tea Cake is the last man she ran off with, and the Porch Sitters are the gossipy people of the town. Janie arrives home after a long trip telling her life to Phoebe. Throughout this trip, Janie has a hard time finding individualism and her identity. She went through hell high and low to try and find peace. She makes a lot of mistakes trying to find who she really is. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone because it teaches you to have your own voice even through tough times, and to make the best of your situation.
The theme of this book is: stand up for yourself, or life and all that's in it will run over you. In the beginning there was a prime person who ran over Janie, that is her husband Joe. He says, "Thank yuh fuh yo' compliments, but mah wife don't know nothin' 'bout no speech-makin'. Ah never married her for nothin' lak dat. She's uh woman and her place is in de home." (p.43) The character Tea Cake exemplifies this in the novel's resolution. "Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was the boss." (p.147)
The dialogue is written in the dialect of the southern black people. Hurston uses black slang in the dialogue, tells it in third person and uses formal English in the narrative. The novel mostly is told in a metaphor. In the novel, she uses God as an example of personification. "The ships sail forever until the watcher turns his eyes away." (p.1) This type of language is very effective. It teaches you the way uneducated blacks use to talk and that's the language the slaves talked. It shows how blacks knew English but formed into their pronunciation of the English dialect. The language in this novel is very similar to the language used in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye." The language of both novels is very convincing to the reader.
The tone of this story is a mellow drama, because there are a lot of rises and falls in the story line. The beginning of the book has a cool, suttle tone with Janie returning back from burying the dead. As the book goes on, the intensity and emotions in the story rise. At first it's confusing, because it starts out with her coming back, then from there the narrator tells the the story leading up to that point. It is also romantic in some ways, like Janie's puberty coming in to her running off with Tea Cake on a quest for love.
There are a lot of good points such as Janie learning to have her own voice and finally finding love. There are also some bad points such as Janie's grandmother dying, her first husband treating her like a working slave and her second husband using her for show are some of the bad points. I feel that readers should read this book, because if you're scared to speak up for yourself, then you can read this for inspiration to find your voice. If you're anxious to have a mate just read this and it will show you why you can wait. Oprah picked the right novel to make a movie out of.
This is the complete article, containing 667 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
