Metaphor In Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the novel, the metaphor of the horizon is used to describe the dreams of Janie on her way to discover her true self. Their Eyes Were Watching God starts off by talking about dreams. The dreams “sail forever on the horizon” (1). Some people can never reach their dreams. Janie reaches her dream of finding meaningful love, but hers is “mocked to death by Time" (1). It was not until Janie was forty, divorced and widowed, that she finally found the true love she was dreaming of since she was sixteen. The blame of Janie's first unhappy marriage falls upon her grandmother, who forced Janie into marrying for money rather than love. Nanny took “the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon… and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing" (89). The …show more content…
Dreams of going on a “journey to the horizons in search of people” (89) was all Janie could think about. She felt “it was important to all the world that she should find [people]" (89). The horizon represents possibilities and hopes for Janie, and she wanted to go and see who was out there in the world. Janie wanted change to come about in her life. She felt that if she could find someone who made her happy, she herself could be happy. In the end, Janie meets people who are young, old, rich, poor, black and white. She has seen all the possibilities and experienced everything she could. Janie has “been tuh de horizon and back" (191). There is nothing left for her to explore. In the final lines of the book, Janie pulls in “her horizon like a great fish-net” which has “so much of life in its meshes" (193). Independent and enervated, she has finally reached the far away horizon. All that Janie has left to do is to sit back and reflect on everything she has seen and been through. She no longer has a desire to go out and search for people or for experiences. There is no longer a desire to change her life. Janie has discovered who she was and was content with