Questions and Answers for Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What Does The Pear Tree Symbolize
The pear tree symbolizes Janie’s change and burgeoning sexuality. A symbol is something that stands for a bigger idea than what it literally means. In the beginning of the book, Janie is...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What are three major ways Janie Crawford changes in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Three major changes that Janie goes through in Their Eyes Were Watching God are that (1) she fits in with a community, (2) learns to do previously gender-restricted activities, and (3) acts with...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What does the metaphor in the first paragraph of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston reveal about...
Zora Neal Hurston opens here novel Their Eyes Were Watching God with an incredibly lyrical metaphor: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the significance of the quotation below, from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God? When Janie...
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character, Janie, decides to abandon her first husband, Logan Killicks, and run off with Joe (Jody) Starks. Her elopement with...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the main theme or message of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is such a rich novel that there is no one main theme or message. Rather, the book is ripe with multiple life lessons. However, one of the central...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In what year/time period is Their Eyes Were Watching set?
Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937 and is considered one of the most important works of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement in post-World War I African...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Can someone help me choose the best thesis statement for an essay on Their Eyes Were Watching God?
One of the best ways to come up with a convincing thesis statement for an essay based on a book is to consider the number of themes that there are in the book and to pick one of those and to...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Describe and analyze 1.) Janie’s relationship with Logan Killicks, and 2.) Janie’s relationship with Joe Starks....
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie marries three times, and her relationship with each husband contributes to her character development toward becoming an independent, confident woman. Logan...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God,what does Nanny mean when she says "ah'm a cracked plate?"
In Chapter 2 of Their Eyes Were Watching God, thirteen-year-old Janie is seen by her grandmother as she kisses the tall and lean Johnny Taylor over the gate. Alarmed that Janie is becoming like the...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What does Joe Starks symbolize in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Joe Starks symbolizes for Janie the horizon that Zora Neale Hurston references throughout the novel. The horizon, the farthest point one can see, is a place that holds Janie's hopes and dreams. In...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
How did the townspeople feel about Janie going out with Teacake?
The townspeople were very critical of her choice to see Teacake. From an external point of view, the marriage of Janie and Joe Starks has everything required for success: wealth, respect, a...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
At the end of chapter 13 of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses personification to describe Janie's soul....
The end of chapter thirteen features a bit of a test of Janie and Tea Cake's relationship. He has taken her money that she had saved carefully and gone and gambled with it. Janie has been...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the description of Tea Cake from the book Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Tea Cake's real name is Vergible Woods. He meets the heroine Janie after she has had two less than fulfilling marriages. Tea Cake is twenty-five years old and is not wealthy, but he has an inner...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What are examples of figurative language in chapters 2 and 3 of Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Zora Neale Hurston portrays Janie as a philosophical, imaginative person through the use of vivid imagery, drawing on multiple senses. Janie feels deep connections to the natural world and, through...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
"She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her then she went inside there to see what it...
The "something falling off the shelf" is Janie's illusion/perception of Joe Starks. Up until this point, Janie has held on to her hopeful beliefs that Jody wanted to be a "big...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Can you explain the quote from the book listed below? It is at the very end of the book. "She pulled in her...
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God begins and ends with the horizon. The horizon is the line between the sky and the earth, or sea, and is the maximum distance that an observer can...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the revelence of the title (Their Eyes Were Watching God) to the hurricanes or to the man made conflicts...
The title of the novel becomes important in Chapters 18 and 19 just before the full fury of the hurricane and again after it is over. However, the set-up for these passages occurs in Chapter 16:...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does the horizon mean for Janie symbolically?
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses the image of the horizon to symbolically represent Janie’s aspirations for equality within marriage. Early in the novel, Hurston employs the...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston writes, "Like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed,...
At the start of chapter 2, Janie is a young woman living with her grandmother, Nanny. As she tells her life story in retrospect, Janie tells Pheoby that she sees "her life like a great tree in leaf...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the significance of Janie's hair in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston?
Janie's hair is a complex symbol in Their Eyes Were Watching God. It takes on its greatest significance when she is living in Eatonville as Joe Stark's wife. Joe is the mayor of Eatonville, and...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the significance of the allusion, "The thing that Saul's daughter had done to David"?
As my colleague mentioned above, the allusion is a biblical one. In 2 Samuel, Chapter 6, King David is so happy about bringing the ark of God to the city of David that he can't help dancing for...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
How does the quote by Tea Cake in Chapter 11, "You got de keys to do kingdom," create an allusion to another kingdom?
In the final line of Chapter 11, Tea Cake tells Janie how much he wants to be with her and expresses his depth of emotion with the words, "You got de keys to de kingdom." This last sentence is a...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
How is Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God shown as heaven for Janie and the citizens? I understand that...
The town of Eatonville could be seen as a kind of heaven in multiple ways. As you suggest, the all black town is a kind of haven for African Americans where they can live and thrive is a place...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the purpose of the pear tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. Thus begins Chapter 2 of Zora Neale Hurston's...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is Janie's situation at the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God?
By refering to the beginning of the novel, I am assuming that you mean the start of the story rather than the beginning of Janie's life, which of course is part of the middle section of the story...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what are differences between Janie's three husbands?
Each of Janie's three husbands has a different personality and social class/profession, and each man helps Janie to develop a sense of her own identity and what she truly wants from her life and...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what are the differences between the language of the men and that of women?
The most important passage in this entire novel that is relevant to language and the way in which men and women communicate, actually occurs in the first two paragraphs of the novel. This expresses...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the relationship between Nanny and Janie? Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. the reason i...
Nanny is Janie's grandmother, raising her after her mother, Leafy, leaves. Nanny's influence is significant early in the novel, as Nanny is seeking to protect Janie from the types of oppression...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The lake is personified as a monster. How does this fit into the plot of Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel written by Zora Neale Hurston. It was first published in 1937 and follows the life of Janie Crawford, who is African American. In the second part of the...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Chapter 16 of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mrs. Turner is very clearly prejudiced. How does Janie react to...
Chapter 16: 1) Mrs. Turner is very clearly prejudiced. How does Janie react to her? Janie humors Mrs. Turner and indulges the older woman's behavior. Janie doesn't try to change Mrs. Turner's views...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, what do the first two paragraphs suggest about...
The two opening paragraphs of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God are as follows: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the significance of the opening scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
The opening scene of Their Eyes Were Watching God provides the lens through which the narrative of the novel is viewed. The opening scene introduces us to Janie, an independent woman who has defied...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, who are the sitters referred to in this following quotation? "These sitters had...
The sitters are quite simply the people of Eatonville sitting on the porch in the evening. Since most of them are laborers during the day, they have essentially been rendered "tongueless, earless,...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Chapter 11 of Their Eyes Were Watching God,what does Janie wish for herself? What does Janie wish for herself?
In Chapter 11, we see the true beginnings of a relationship between Tea Cake and Janie developing. However, after all of her years in Eatonville with Joe, Janie is suspicious of her own feelings...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What are some similes in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
An excellent simile is used in chapter 5 to describe the behavior of Joe Starks. Joe makes a lot of the townspeople uncomfortable because he is always putting on airs and acting like he is better...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
At the end of the novel of Their Eyes Were Watching God, does Janie die? Or is she just thinking and daydreaming...
Throughout the narrative of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is telling the story of her life to her old friend, Pheoby Watson. Janie's story is sad, then happy, then sad again, but as she tells...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the importance or significance of the closing scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
The beginning and end of Their Eyes Were Watching God provide a frame for the novel. At the start, Janie returns to Eatonville, and her former neighbors gossip about her from their porches. She...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the significance of the hurricane and rabid dog at the end of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God? Are...
In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is a protagonist who struggles with dependence on men as she grows into a more decisive and independent person. She is involved in three marriages,...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Analyze how Janie's tension between outward conformity and inward questioning contributes to the work in Their Eyes...
The tension between outward conformity and inward questioning is the very heart of Their Eyes Were Watching God, as Janie's character's iconic status comes from her journey of self-actualization....
Their Eyes Were Watching God
How important is Hurston's use of dialect to our understanding of Janie and the other characters and their way of life?
Zora Neale Hurston uses dialect to help her characters appear to be real people with actual cultural backgrounds. A character's dialect is a large part of who they are as a person. It can show...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What are the writing styles used in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Another literary device that Hurston uses in the novel is free indirect discourse. This form of discourse involves both the narrator's speech and the characters' speech or thoughts. Free indirect...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, what does the word jooks mean?
A folklorist and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston' Their Eyes Were Watching God is both an account of black heritage and her main character's journey to female individuality. In Chapter 14, for...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What was Janie Crawford's effect on others in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Janie Crawford drives women crazy with envy and men crazy with lust. Chapter one shows Janie walking through Eatonville to get to her house, and the way the townspeople respond to her proves the...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What are some examples of humor in Their Eyes Were Watching God? These can include satire, parody, burlesque and...
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God depicts the journey towards maturity and independence of a young black woman in the South in the early twentieth century. Hurston does more,...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
In the following quotation from Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, what is significant about...
At the very end of Chapter 2 of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny speaks to her granddaughter Janie as follows: "Ah can't die easy thinkin' maybe de menfolks white or...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
How does Janie's grandmother treat her like an object rather than a woman in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
Nanny’s objectification of her granddaughter is evident through her decision about Janie’s marriage. As the older Janie reminisces about her childhood and adolescence, she acknowledges the strength...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Why do you think Janie decides to run off with Joe Starks?
The narrator tells us why Janie choose to run off with Jody. He represents "change and chance", a distinct contrast to her boring and predictable life with Logan. As a young girl, Janie dreamed of...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What was Janie's most noticeable physical characteristic?
Janie's most noticeable characteristic is her hair; it's long, straight, and representative of her blended racial heritage. She's a beautiful woman who is admired and desired by men throughout the...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What does "he teaches her the maiden language all over" mean? Teacake taught Janie the madien language all over. I...
Hurston means that Teacake taught Janie to appreciate and respect the fact that she was a woman and the things that come along with that. Janie was oppressed when she was forced to be with Logan at...
Their Eyes Were Watching God
What is the name of the town that Jody and Janie moved to in Their Eyes Were Watching God?
The name of the town to which Jody and Janie moved is Eatonville, Florida. Joe Starks is an ambitious black man who has "been workin' for white folks all his life". He had always wanted to be "a...
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