Mr Kreinbring’s Space

English 10 American Literature

We’re currently reading Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

So far this has been our course of study:

 Chapters 1-3 Focus on Narration:

Their Eyes Were Watching God opens with an unidentified third-person narrator who remains outside the story. This anonymous, omniscient narrator immediately creates interest by declaring: “So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead.” The first page also contains one of several allusions to the book’s title: “the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.”

However, the narration changes when Janie tells her story to her best friend, Pheoby Watson.

Discuss these questions in a small group. Have one person take notes and then use the big paper to make a graphic representation of your responses.

•          How can an omniscient narrator tell the story at the same time that the novel’s heroine, Janie, also tells her story? Do these voices reflect different parts of Janie, or does the omniscient narrator reveal another force in Janie’s universe?

• Janie is judged throughout the novel. In the first chapter, who judges her, and why? How does Janie respond?

• Why does Janie choose to tell her story only to her best friend Pheoby? How does our audience (especially friends) affect what we reveal or conceal?

 Writing Opportunity:

Choose one secondary character who has appeared so far Chapters 1-3): Nanny, Logan, Pheoby, the Eatonville townspeople, Johnny Taylor, or Janie’s mother.

Rewrite the novel’s beginning from the perspective of this character. Use this exercise to reflect on how a story can be told from multiple perspectives .Why did Hurston choose Janie as the heroine instead of another character. 

Chapter 4 Focus on Character and Motivation:

• How do Logan and Joe reveal different sides of Janie? What are their motivations?

• To what extent does Janie acquire her own voice and the ability to shape her own life? How are the two attributes related?

Think:

 In Chapter 3, our protagonist, Janie, wanders back and forth to the pear tree, “wondering and thinking” as she tries to adjust to her arranged marriage. She struggles with words, inheriting “deepness” from her Nanny. Although Janie fails to find any “bloom” in this marriage, she discovers that, “she knew things that nobody had ever told her, “the words of the trees and the wind.” Like her Nanny, Janie’s “basin of mind” finds words in the sights and sounds of nature.

Review the first four chapters, documenting moments -write down examples and the page numbers- when Janie finds meaning in nature.

Discuss: What other natural phenomena guide Janie on her journey?

 Writing Opportunity:

 You will write about the way the sun reflects Janie’s emotional state.