Literary Choices in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston employs many tactics that make the story come to life around the reader and force them to more deeply engage with the novel. Though the list is extensive, two things that have stood out to me so far have been the figurative language used by Hurston and how she writes all of the dialogue between characters in a southern dialect.

One of the characteristics that forced me to more deeply engage in the novel was to have the characters speaking in a dialect of the deep south. One example of is when Pheoby and Janie are talking about the gossipers on the porch, Janie says, “‘Ah don’t mean to bother wid tellen’ ‘em nothin’ Pheoby. T’ain’t worth de trouble. You can tell ‘em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ‘cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf’” (6). Unlike a book written with “standard” spelling and grammar, I found it impossible to speed read or skim over any of the dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Because I was not used to reading the dialect the characters were speaking in, I had to really slow down and take the time to work out what was being said. The result of this was not only that I paid a lot of attention to what the characters were saying, but that I could almost hear their voices in my head as I went, and that reading the dialogue felt more like listening to a conversation than reading words on a page.

Another aspect of Their Eyes Were Watching God that I felt made the story come to life was the use of figurative language in the descriptions of characters. One example of this is when Nanny is telling Janie the story of her life and describes the wife of her former master. Instead of simply describing her as cold-hearted and bitter, Nanny says that she “Look lak she been livin’ through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring . . . Ah tried not to feel de breeze off her face, but it got so cold in dere dat Ah was freezin’ to death under the kivvers” (17). I found this to be an incredibly powerful metaphor because the reader can see the woman much more clearly, both physically and in terms of her personality and its effects on Nanny. The other metaphors and uses of figurative language have had the same results on me. They make it much easier to visualize the characters and the setting, and make the novel a lot of fun to read!

I’m curious to observe how these two literary devices develop throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God, and how they continue to affect my reading of the novel.  

Connecting With His Roots

Shortly before giving the speech that attracts the attention of the Brotherhood, the narrator stops and buys three yams from a street vendor. In this moment, we see the narrator briefly reconnect with his roots and realize that he’s been kept running his entire life before he joins the Brotherhood and has the veil lowered over his eyes once more.

When he sees the man selling yams, the narrator is overcome with nostalgia. This is an unusual emotion for the narrator; normally, he seems to be ashamed of his past and avoids talking or even thinking about it. Especially in Harlem, we have repeatedly seen the narrator try and cast off his past self, all connections to his former life, and move forward as a new person. For example, when the narrator first arrives in the north, he describes in depth how he plans to redo his wardrobe to create a new persona for himself. Later when he is having breakfast in a diner, he refuses to order the special consisting of foods he associates with the south, and instead chooses toast, something plain and generic.  

I also saw it as quite ironic that the moment where the narrator realizes “I yam what I am” directly precedes his being recruited by the Brotherhood where his identity is erased and sense of individuality is suppressed. Immediately upon his acceptance into the Brotherhood, the narrator is given a new name and persona, erasing the past he had just begun to connect to, and told that there is no “I” and that no one’s individual beliefs or history are significant in the bigger picture.

I also think that the narrator briefly realizes here that he has been kept running for his entire life. He says, “What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? . . . I had never formed a personal attitude towards so much. I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple…” However, though he has made this realization, he is still far from discovering invisibility. Instead of trying to appear as though he still believes in the accepted attitudes while secretly having his own opinions, he decides to just flat out believe and do whatever he wants. We can see, even by the end of this scene, that this isn’t going to work out for the narrator; “Yet the freedom to eat yams was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city. An unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it had been frost-bitten”.