Character Development In Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston

Character development in literature can be extremely well illustrated through literary techniques. One novel in particular, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, is written in such a way that literary devices accomplish this purpose. Because of her use of various literary techniques, Hurston is able to develop Janie as a character and free her from the judgement that she experiences throughout the novel. The novel opens with the conclusion of Janie’s struggles. No longer married, she has returned to Eatonville, the town that she and her second husband established. The mood of this return is best conveyed through an allegory: “So the beginning of this was a woman who had come back from burying the dead...She had come back from …show more content…
Janie is found at the end of the book in exactly the same place she is found at its outset: in Eatonville, on her porch, with her best friend Pheoby. After giving her life story to Pheoby, Janie gives the most important moral lesson of the entire novel. Janie says that there are, “Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (192). Janie says nothing more for the entirety of the book, letting these last words reverberate. The meaning of Janie’s homily is that each and every person must live for themselves, and for themselves only. He must believe that God will guide him and is required to search for happiness from within; the latter of which Janie learned to do from her one true love, Tea Cake. Janie despises her previous two husbands; through Tea Cake, however, Janie learns what true love really is. Her first husband made Janie believe that marriage does not make love. Now, finally, after all her years, she has been freed from the judgement of all of her past husbands and is fully free to live as the woman she was born to …show more content…
Her masterful use of literary techniques when describing the judgement that Janie endures speaks to each and every reader of Their Eyes Were Watching God. From Janie’s first marriage through her last, she faces judgement from every angle. She is judged by her husbands, by others, and even by the courts. It is only through careful examination of one of Hurston’s greatest writings that a reader can truly understand the moral lessons of the book and see how Janie develops as a distinct personality. Like Janie said in her very last lines of the book, every person must watch for God and live in a way that makes him