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Techniques
Hurston skillfully balances the third-person narrative voice with realistic conversation in the rural black dialect. Structurally, Janie's storytelling to Pheoby frames the novel. Like bookends, the first and last chapters allow the narrative to flash back and then come full circle. The movement of the novel then spirals outward with Pheoby's promise to grow from her friend's experiences and with Janie's reaching out to the horizon.
Language soars to express the amazing journey to selfhood. One of the remarkable aspects in Their Eyes Were Watching God is the realistic depiction of life as the writer knew it, for she had an ear for authentic speech rhythms in dialogue and for vividly realistic imagery. Hurston's lyrical beauty of language rings true with the power of words: "Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song."
The richly evocative language of stories, songs, idioms, and figures of speech makes the novel so memorable. For instance, from the porch of the general store come picturesque scenes of folks gathered to swap tales, gossip, tease, and flirt. One day Janie gets feisty and boldly tells the men that God sometimes confides in women about how men assume they are so superior to women and how surprised men are going to be when they find out they don't know much about women: "It's so easy to make yo'self out God Almighty when you ain't got nothin' tuh strain against but women and chickens," Janie tells the arrogant men. When they call her an old woman of nearly forty, Janie retaliates with playful exaggeration ("playin' de dozens"): "You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it but you' big voice.
Humph! Talkin "bout me looking old! When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life." Then there are the porch "mule-talkers" who have fun with Matt Bonner about his skinny mule; they tell Matt the women took the mule down by the lake and "had 'im flat on de ground usin' his sides fuh uh wash board." The porch gatherings allow Hurston to tap into the richness of the black oral tradition and to give dignity to uneducated people and their colorful folk sayings of wit and wisdom.
A notable example of imaginative language as a tool to unify themes is the horizon imagery at the beginning, middle, and end of the novel to emphasize Janie's potential for a full life. She hates her grandmother for having cut off that potential, for having "taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon. . . and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her." When Janie and Tea Cake watch the hurricane with their friends, their eyes stare into the dark sky and measure their own insignificance against God's arbitrary destruction with such forces of nature. In this sense the horizon suggests the fate no one can readily comprehend. By the novel's conclusion, Janie has control of her destiny as she pulls in "her horizon like a great fish-net."
Metaphors and similes also provide a powerful storytelling technique. Janie sees herself like "like a great tree in leaf" with all its pains and pleasures. In contrast to Janie's grandmother's prophetic warning that love is "de very prong all us black women gits hung on" is Janie's own idealistically romantic vision of the pear tree in her backyard. The tree represents her youthful sensuality and exuberance. This zest for life explodes in vibrant images as young Janie watches a bee, laden with pollen, enter the pear tree bloom and pollinate it. The irony is that she will have to wait many years before reaching this level of emotional completion and sexual fulfillment.
Mules also suggest comparisons in the story. Until Tea Cake enters Janie's life, she must endure the humiliation and abuse by her grandmother and first two husbands.
Nanny compares black women to the mules of the world, because they do all the work.
By forcing Janie to marry Killicks, Nanny ignores Janie's own desires, thinking it is for her granddaughter's own good. Killicks and Starks both have mules and treat them in ways somewhat similar to the way they treat Janie--one mistreats his hard-working mule, and the other puts his (formerly Matt Bonner's yellow mule) out to pasture as a status symbol.
Janie's hair rags offer still another metaphor for oppression. Joe, the ever-jealous husband, sees a man behind Janie lightly touching her beautiful hair and forces Janie to wear a head rag. However, instead of allowing the rags to cover her sense of selfesteem and stifle her spirit, she realizes she has an inside and an outside, and she would not mix them. She attends Joe's funeral with "weeping and wailing outside" but "resurrection and life" inside. That night she burns the oppressive head rags and the next day, her hair swings free in a thick braid well below her waist. Now emancipated, Janie can do what she pleases for the rest of her life.
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