Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Their Eyes Were Watching God chronicles the life of a black woman named Janie through a personal retrospective narrative. Janie's struggle is one of finding fulfillment through love, although she eventually realizes that a sense of fulfillment can be found independent of love.
The beginning of the novel is, in essence, the story's end. Returning home, Hurston introduces Janie through the gossip of the town's "peanut gallery," scrutinizing her from the safety of a front porch. It is important to note that the perspective of the story frequently changes through the character's shifting dialogues; an effective device illustrating a myriad of opinions and views, while detaching the reader from the notion that the novel is a mere series of recollections and more of an evolving story. The ridiculing and critical demeanor of the townsfolk's conversation when Janie returns masks their jealousy of her. As Hurston notes of the observers, "Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times" (2). Janie's life was full of adventure and journey, and these women resented her for it. In this way, Hurston presents the porch as a symbol of immobility, and of a reluctance or inability to act or affect change.
While on the immediate surface Their Eyes Were Watching God appears to be little more than a woman's struggle to find fulfillment, a closer reading reveals a narrative of the women's plight with drastic political implications...