Essay On Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Only a spirit as free and confident as Zora Neale Hurston could envision the true nature of Janie’s triumph in her victory walk through town as the men gawked and the women talked on the porch when she returned from burying the dead at the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie is no longer a young girl, but her body still attracts attention from the men. She has been a wife three times, far beyond wearing that “great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume” instead of neatly tied up like a married woman’s hair ought to be. When she lived in town she was a woman who knew how to wear expensive black clothes for mourning, not dusty overalls and a faded shirt fit for a field hand, not for a…show more content…
The dead have already met their judgment, and the presence of the dead remind the living of this uncomfortable inevitability. The hurricane is a bringer of random death. Hurston writes that terrified humans cowered in its presence -- “their eyes were watching god.” God is the ultimate power, and the final demonstration of that power in human life is death. Humans stare with awe and terror as it approaches and causes them to measure their own lives as ready to meet their maker or not. To watch God is to watch judgment. Death brings accountability and finality even to those who believe in nothing for whatever they have left behind on this earth will be the measure of their lives. There will be no further opportunity for amendment or…show more content…
When Janie pulls in the horizon like a fishnet at the end of the book, she has captured it, arriving at her horizon while the passive Watcher “turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.” Janie, on the other hand, is content in her soul and remembers everything she doesn’t want to forget. The Watcher sees only Janie if he is looking at the horizon, neverlanding, because he cannot reach it. Securely at peace, Janie’s dreams do not mock her because her dreams are the truth. The price of that truth is high. Real gods require
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