Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God

Roughly 2.2 billion people practice Christianity worldwide, yet some have differing perspectives of what being Christian actually means. Zora Neale Hurston incorporated many non-traditional ideas of Christianity in her literary works. Having been raised in a Christian home (her father John Hurston was a Baptist preacher) and later taking on the title of an anthropologist, allowed Hurston to be well-informed on the subject of religion and to formulate her own thoughts and ideas about religion. Hurston included many references to God in her book Their Eyes Were Watching God. One would assume these references of God to be positive, considering she was raised Christian, however they are not. Through Hurston’s images of a higher power and destruction, she demonstrates God’s cruel power but also the faith people must have in Him, in order to reveal the complexity of not only finding oneself, but also finding God.
Hurston establishes a dubiously negative view of God through her language choices in order to manifest the idea of God being. After Joe has become the …show more content…
Tea Cake went on a walk to see the damage done by the storm. He was forced to help bury the dead. The whites were put into coffins and the blacks were thrown into a hole. The bodies of the dead were described as, “Death had found them watching, trying to see beyond seeing”(170). During the hurricane, people were “watching God”(), trying to see what he may bring. Hurston sees God and Death as equivalents. Therefore, one could assume that Hurston uses God and Death interchangeably. God (or Death) found the people watching him, apparently “trying to see beyond seeing”. Hurston suggests that God is a name that society gives to the unknown- the things that they cannot see. Connecting this to “see beyond seeing” make more sense because the people were “straining their eyes” to try and see the unknown- God and