Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
“A Black woman's quest for selfhood told in the most beautiful English prose of the 20th century — dismissed by critics, buried for decades, then resurrected to become essential.”
Language Register
Radically dual: Hurston's narration is formal, dense, metaphor-rich; her dialogue is transcribed African American Vernacular English. These two registers operate simultaneously and are equally valid.
Syntax Profile
Hurston's narration uses long, rhythmic sentences with strong metaphorical cores — the pear tree passage, the horizon metaphor, the hurricane's 'six eyes watching God.' Her dialogue is phonetically transcribed AAVE, capturing elision, vowel shifts, and rhythmic patterns: 'Ah wants,' 'you ain't,' 'Ah don't keer.' The two registers never bleed into each other — the code-switch is always clean and deliberate.
Figurative Language
Extremely high in narration. Metaphor-based, not simile-based. The pear tree, the horizon, the mule, the head rag, the 'inside and outside self' — all sustained metaphors that recur with variation throughout the text.
Era-Specific Language
Joe Starks's signature exclamation — corruption of 'By God,' signals his self-appointed divine authority
Nanny's central metaphor — Black women as the most exploited labor in American society
The Everglades agricultural region; also a literal and figurative site of fertile, unglamorous reality
Indirect speech acts that communicate critique through indirection — a central African American rhetorical tradition
Janie's phrase for Joe's authority, which she reveals is empty noise — volume mistaken for substance
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Janie Crawford
Her narrated thoughts are in the narrator's lyrical standard English; her speech shifts between AAVE and a more formal register depending on context. With Tea Cake, she is relaxed and dialectal. With the court, she is formal.
Janie is multilingual in the deepest sense — she can inhabit multiple registers. Her interiority is always in the most elevated prose in the novel, suggesting that her inner life exceeds any single language.
Joe Starks
His dialect is AAVE but formal and commanding — he has learned to perform authority through language. His signature 'I god' is an invocation of self-divinity.
A man who has studied power and mimics it perfectly. His language is as constructed as Gatsby's 'old sport' — a costume that fits perfectly until Janie tears it off.
Tea Cake Woods
Warm, rhythmic, musical AAVE. Full contractions, inventive metaphors, easy laughter. 'You got de keys to de kingdom.' 'Ah'm de Apostle Paul tuh de Gentiles.'
A man completely at ease in his own language and skin. Tea Cake never performs — he speaks. The absence of performance is the most radical thing about him.
Nanny
Deep, heavy AAVE — the oldest dialect in the novel. Her metaphors come from the Bible and slavery. 'De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.'
Nanny carries the weight of history in her speech. Every sentence is shaped by what she survived. Her love for Janie is encoded in the only language she has.
Logan Killicks
Sparse, transactional AAVE. Short sentences. Commands and complaints. 'Git on dat mule.' 'You think Ah'm yo' daddy.'
A man who speaks only in imperatives because he only thinks in transactions. He married Janie as property and addresses her as such.
Pheoby Watson
Warm, question-asking, encouraging AAVE. She listens more than she talks. Her sentences invite Janie to continue.
The ideal audience — the person whose speech creates space for another's story. Pheoby's voice is shaped to receive, not to dominate.
Narrator's Voice
Third-person omniscient but intimately aligned with Janie's consciousness. The narrator's voice is lyrical, metaphor-dense, and formally literary — distinct from every character's dialogue. This is Hurston's deliberate linguistic argument: the community's vernacular is beautiful and sufficient for living; the narrator's formal register is beautiful and sufficient for art; both are true simultaneously.
Tone Progression
Chapters 1-3 (Nanny, Logan)
Dreaming, then disappointed
The pear tree vision followed by the cold floor of marriage without love. The prose is lyrical in description of Janie's interior, flat when depicting Logan's world.
Chapters 4-6 (Joe Starks)
Trapped, gradually suffocating
The prose maintains lyrical beauty in narration but Janie's interior voice shrinks. The gap between narrative beauty and narrative content enacts the split between Janie's suppressed self and her performed self.
Chapters 7-8 (Tea Cake, muck)
Joyful, communal, present-tense
The novel's most expansive section. The dialect flourishes, the storytelling multiplies, the porch is accessible. The prose breathes.
Chapters 9-10 (hurricane, shooting, return)
Mythic, then elegiac
The hurricane sections rise to their most biblical register. The shooting is rendered with flat precision. The return to Eatonville and the closing horizon image bring the two registers — lyrical and factual — into final synthesis.
Stylistic Comparisons
- William Faulkner — equally dense use of vernacular speech, but Hurston celebrates AAVE where Faulkner exoticizes Southern dialect
- Toni Morrison — Morrison credited Hurston as a direct precursor; both use nonstandard English as a source of narrative authority
- Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man — also navigates the politics of Black voice, but Ellison's narrator is self-consciously formal where Janie is dialectal
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions