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.
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.
The dialogue is definitely something worth paying attention to, as it adds an aspect to the book that transforms it into such an alive story. When we watched the documentary for Invisible Man, some of the scenes brought to the screen were refreshing in terms of how I looked at them within the novel. Just the very fact that they were put into visual form gave me a new perspective on the scenes because my imagination following the novel became sharper. I think that the dialogue in this novel is similar to this concept -- it brings the images of the scenes and context clearly into my mind as I read. Hurston just brings us right into the scenes. Going along with the whole reading experience, the dialogue is even more important in the way that it makes the characters genuine as you point out. For me personally, this attractive trait of the dialogue style - making the characters true to who they are - far outweighs the downside of a few breaks in the flow, so personally I am hardly bothered at all with these issues and the flow of the text works well in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteThe dialogue definitely makes it feel more laid back. This is especially true for porch scenes. With everyone lounging around the porch gossiping or telling stories or whatever, the dialogue definitely makes such scenes much more natural and light-hearted.
ReplyDeleteTo add a little to the dialogue discussion (I'm going on a slight tangent here, mostly because I don't have enough to write a blog post on), we briefly mentioned in our class how some offense was taken after the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God for the fact that the narration was written in "proper english" vs. the dialogue, as if that was supposed to be a message (This way of speaking is right vs. this way of speaking which is wrong) which I think is absurd. There's a generally established way of writing for a reason (sort of like there's an accepted system of measurement in science--although the parallels aren't always there between the two).
I think there would be a better basis for protest against Their Eyes Were Watching God if Hurston didn't include the historically accurate dialogue...
Anyways, I agree with all that you said.
The dialogue definitely gives this a book a wayyyy different vibe than the other books we have read. I would agree with previous comments that it gives a way gentler vibe then some of the previous books we read. Another difference is that it really puts the focus for me on the sentences their saying rather than the specifics of the words they use. For example, when someone says something like "auh saw yuh when yuh ducked behind", its very hard to analyze and dissect the sentence. In contrast to Invisible man, where every time a color was mentioned, there was no less than 32 different ways to interpret it. So I would agree with everything you said, except that I don't think it makes it much more complicated.
ReplyDelete