The Road to Peace
The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God revolves around the story of Janie, a woman in search of love, and the resolution of that journey. The novel explores her development as a person, and the peace of mind that follows her quest. Hurston ends the novel with Janie’s spiritual soundness: “here was peace”. Through various details, both major and minor, Hurston manipulates Janie’s experiences and development to bring her to the content conclusion.
In the beginning, where Janie was only a young girl, she had a vague idea of what love was and what she expected from her future. The image of the pear tree was significant, as it embodies her vision of love and marriage, along with her experience with Johnny Taylor. When the narrator …show more content…
The narrator’s simple yet significant and heavy in meaning description, “Here was peace” (193), confirms Janie’s state of mind and serves as a bridge that leads to an open ending of inner peace and fulfillment. This quote marks the “spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation” for the novel. These final lines recap the elements of resolution marked in previous parts of the novel. Through Janie’s different lessons (her marriages), Janie became mature and the knowledge she got from that brought forth her contentment. Her yearning for experience and love is the driving force behind the novel. Now that she has found those, the story must come to an end. This quote also pinpoints the end of all calamity of the relationships (hence peace), that she is a free woman now and is bound by no man. This end allows her to seek other things, to live her own life, and to be her own individual. This is further shown by Janie releasing and playing with her hair an act that shows her individuality - it is more significant since she could not do this when Joe was still alive. Artfully noting “she pulled in her horizon like a great fish net” (193), the narrator portrays the closing of the novel with a simple act that bears a lot of meaning. The repetition of “horizon” resounds nicely with her having “been tuh de horizon and back”; it also shows that she (represented by her hair) is a complex human being - a horizon of emotions, thoughts and experiences. Other than showing defiance to Joe and to display her individuality, Janie shows homage to Tea Cake, who loved her hair and had played with it in the past. He had given her what she wanted while allowing her to give herself to him, and she is thankful for that “loving
The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God revolves around the story of Janie, a woman in search of love, and the resolution of that journey. The novel explores her development as a person, and the peace of mind that follows her quest. Hurston ends the novel with Janie’s spiritual soundness: “here was peace”. Through various details, both major and minor, Hurston manipulates Janie’s experiences and development to bring her to the content conclusion.
In the beginning, where Janie was only a young girl, she had a vague idea of what love was and what she expected from her future. The image of the pear tree was significant, as it embodies her vision of love and marriage, along with her experience with Johnny Taylor. When the narrator …show more content…
The narrator’s simple yet significant and heavy in meaning description, “Here was peace” (193), confirms Janie’s state of mind and serves as a bridge that leads to an open ending of inner peace and fulfillment. This quote marks the “spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation” for the novel. These final lines recap the elements of resolution marked in previous parts of the novel. Through Janie’s different lessons (her marriages), Janie became mature and the knowledge she got from that brought forth her contentment. Her yearning for experience and love is the driving force behind the novel. Now that she has found those, the story must come to an end. This quote also pinpoints the end of all calamity of the relationships (hence peace), that she is a free woman now and is bound by no man. This end allows her to seek other things, to live her own life, and to be her own individual. This is further shown by Janie releasing and playing with her hair an act that shows her individuality - it is more significant since she could not do this when Joe was still alive. Artfully noting “she pulled in her horizon like a great fish net” (193), the narrator portrays the closing of the novel with a simple act that bears a lot of meaning. The repetition of “horizon” resounds nicely with her having “been tuh de horizon and back”; it also shows that she (represented by her hair) is a complex human being - a horizon of emotions, thoughts and experiences. Other than showing defiance to Joe and to display her individuality, Janie shows homage to Tea Cake, who loved her hair and had played with it in the past. He had given her what she wanted while allowing her to give herself to him, and she is thankful for that “loving