Review Of Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God'

Gorman Beauchamp makes commentary in his article Three Notes on Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God about three different facets of the novel. The first is about a widely criticized judgement by Richard Wright. Wright claimed that the novel had no theme, no message, and no thought. Beauchamp does not agree with that, but he does agree with one of Wright’s other points: Hurston’s characters were not serious enough. Beauchamp writes, “Hurston’s characters ought to be doing less laughing and more sobbing, if they are to be taken seriously”. He believes that the meaning of the book was not as strongly delivered as it could have been because of the silliness of the characters. In the second part of his article, he claims that he made two mistakes in anticipating what was going to happen because of momentarily racial stereotypes. The first was about Tea Cake and the day Janie found that he and 200 dollars were both missing. Beauchamp writes that he assumed the worst. …show more content…
He assumed that a black defendant in the 1930s was doomed to jail time. He claims that Hurston defied and shut down his stereotypical thinking. His third note, is that he believes the ending of the novel is wrong. Beauchamp uses a literary strategy called "Chekhov's gun" and Hart Crane’s “the logic of the metaphor” to explain his thinking. Chekhov's gun strategy says that if there is a gun in the first act, someone better use it in the second, otherwise it was pointless. Crane's strategy claims that a metaphor creates its own logic whether or not the writer plainly draws it. Beauchamp claims that the pear tree metaphor was the gun to be shot in the end. Janie should have had Tea Cakes baby. That would have been the shot and it would have been the logic behind the