Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God

  • Submitted By: kitinda254
  • Date Submitted: 03/08/2010 11:04 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 436
  • Page: 2
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Their eyes were watching God
Key facts
-full title  · Their Eyes Were Watching God
-author  · Zora Neale Hurston
-type of work  · Novel
-genre  · Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel), American Southern spiritual journey
-language  · English
-time and place written  · Written in seven weeks during 1937 while Hurston was in Haiti; published in New York
-date of first publication  · September 1937
-publisher  · J.B. Lippincott, Inc.
- narrator  · The narrator is anonymous, though it is easy to detect a distinctly Southern sensibility in the narrator’s voice.
-point of view  · Though the novel is narrated in the third person, by a narrator who reveals the characters’ thoughts and motives, most of the story is framed as Janie telling a story to Pheoby. The result is a narrator who is not exactly Janie but who is abstracted from her. Janie’s character resonates in the folksy language and metaphors that the narrator sometimes uses. Also, much of the text relishes in the immediacy of dialogue.
-tone  · The narrator’s attitude toward Janie, which Hurston appears to share, is entirely sympathetic and affirming.
-tense  · Past
-setting (time)  · The early twentieth century, presumably the 1920s or 1930s
-setting (place)  · Rural Florida
-protagonist  · Janie
-major conflict  · During her quest for spiritual fulfillment, Janie clashes with the values that others impose upon her.
-rising action  · Janie’s jettisoning of the materialistic desires of Nanny, Logan, and Jody; her attempt to balance self-assertion with her love for Tea Cake; the hurricane—this progression pushes her toward the eventual conflict between her environment (including the people around her) and her need to understand herself.
-climax  · The confrontation between Janie and the insane Tea Cake in Chapter 19 marks the moment at which Janie asserts herself in the face of the most difficult obstacle.
-falling action  · Janie’s decision to shoot Tea Cake demonstrates that she has the...

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