Janie and the narrator from Invisible Man

In both Their Eyes Were Watching God  and Invisible Man, we have narrators that are looking for something. Janie is looking for love, or more specifically her ideal setting of love, which she procured through an epiphany under a pear tree, and for the narrator in Invisible Man although his goal changes, by the end of the book he wants to answer the question of his identity, and who he really is.

Both these characters are similar in many ways, but they also have some stark differences. For one, Janie seems to have much more control over her life and decisions than does the narrator. The narrator gets pushed around being forced into roles which he doesn't really want to be in, such as having to find a job after he is kicked out of college, while Janie has enough free will to be able to leave her marriage with the notion that maybe doing this could further her mission of achieving her ideals.

One similarity between the two characters is that they both feel compelled to do something with their lives. For Janie it is only realizing her ideals, but the narrator wants to achieve a position of respect in society and much of his life is lived with that goal in mind. Going to college and experiencing the humiliation of being in a boxing ring before giving a speech to a crowd that doesn't want to listen at all, shows that the narrator has determinations to make his dreams successful. Both of the characters have these ideals in the beginning, but for the narrator, his ideal are shattered and his first impressions of almost everything seem to be wrong. He thinks that the Brotherhood will be good for him, but it only causes him to see more separation in what he thinks versus the ideology of others. He wants to become successful in a way similar to Bledsoe, but then Bledsoe is revealed to not be such a great guy.

The determination of these two characters to reach a goal is similar, with both taking risks at some point in their lives to advance themselves towards what they want to achieve, yet their situations are so different that it is hard to compare them in many aspects. How do you think these characters are related?

Janie's hunt for love

Much discussion has been had around the question of Janie's ideals of love in a relationship. The scene with the pear tree where she has an "epiphany" about how life is supposed to work and the point where she enters into full consciousness, gives her the ideal of love being a state that should be attainable, most likely through marriage, and affects her decisions in the future heavily.

Are Janie's ideals bad? I don't think so, and I don't think this is a point that the book is trying to make. Janie seems to care a lot about her ideals, and is willing to go fairly far away from where she is comfortable, as she leaves home for a guy that she had only know for a week. She is willing to go through any experience just to achieve this ideal. At first the experience is marriage, where she think that since all the adult say that marriage leads to love, it will happen to her too. When it doesn't really live up to her expectations, disappointing her in many aspects, she decides to have more experiences, leaving her old marriage behind completely. She leaves with Jody, not really knowing what she is getting into, but because there is a chance for her ideals to be recognized she takes the chance and goes with it.

I think Janie's ideals lead to a determination that isn't present in many people other than for survival. After leaving her first marriage, she can't go back, so she has to make her situation with Jody work, and because of this she endures all of his antics for 20 years, trying to find what she is looking for and surviving until she can, trying all the time to get closer to her ideals. For Janie it seems that surviving is just part of trying to reach her ideals.

This is a determination that we don't really find present in many other characters. I'm sure her attachment to her ideals will be tested much more, as it already has, and this will lead to more developments in the book. It will be interesting to find out how these ideals change, or don't change, and what happens with her in the future. 

Dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God

The phonetic dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God stands out as different from he other books we have read in this course so far. Although this dialogue is similar to that of characters like Trueblood in Invisible Man and some of the speech in Native Son, we have never seen its use so widespread throughout all the characters' speech.

The dialogue is interesting because it forces you to pay attention to the text and try to hear what they are say; you can't really just scan this and hope to really understand what is going on. In addition to this, I think that the phonetic dialogue also serves to give us more understanding into who the characters are and what their background is. Comparing this type of speech to the narrator from Invisible Man there is a stark difference between just how they pronounce words, and this allows us to evaluate the characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God as more genuine.

At some points this dialogue does feel somewhat forced though. Instead of just providing context for the characters, this dialogue just seems to make reading the book more difficult. Some words are hard to discern and some may just not mean anything, and this complicates understanding the book to an extent. Because this book is so dialogue heavy, understanding it is key, but when it takes some time to understand what one word means it can be detrimental to the whole book.

The dialogue also is interesting because of the stark contrast it has with the narration of the book. Because the dialogue is written phonetically and the narration is in "proper" English we get a dynamic where there are clear breaks between the two, but they still flow well together, adding another layer to this dialogue.

Overall, I think that the dialogue presented in this way can both be good and bad. Often it leads to feel that the characters are more real, as they speak in colloquialisms, which is just like everyday speech, but this dialogue can also be bad. It sometimes complicates comprehending the book to an unwanted extent.