Their Eyes Were Watching God Freedom Quotes

Hurston utilizes Tea Cake as a trickster figure through his erratic behavior that deconstructs Janie’s past and allows her to develop an identity in order to show the solution for Africans to overcome a system of injustice through finding happiness and security within themselves. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie, the female protagonist, undergoes a journey to freedom, which she first believes she can find through marriage. Her first two marriages prove to be oppressive, until she meets a man named Tea Cake. Eventually Janie runs away with Tea Cake to start a new life, however, Janie begins to develop suspicions when Tea Cake takes her hidden money and goes missing. This conniving behavior is inherent to tricksters, like Tea Cake.

Dracula and The Autobiography of Malcolm X both have different versions of freedom. They speak on how the mind can be controlled. Dr. John "Jack" Seward, a psychologist, talks about his patient. His patient is very well under some sort of imprisonment

Hurston uses the narrative consciousness in Their Eyes, to characterize those who are silent and lack their own voice, by doing this Hurston gives depth, to those whose voices, are heard. Throughout the entire novel, the development of the male voice seems to parallel the development of Janie's. The men in Janie's life have voices, and it is by her relationships with these men, that Janie's voice gets stronger. Janie becomes more self confident with each relationship she endures. Hurston, by using the consciousness narrative, is actually speaking for Janie; the narrator and Janie are like one. This might be the reason that Hurston gives little voice to Janie's character. Janie is not silenced in the novel, she is expressed through the narrative. Which if the reader does not close read, the reader will not comprehend this aspect of Hurston's novel.

She learns to control her voice after she finds it. Similarly, the narrator is silent in exposed places, neither revealing why Janie isn’t upset with Tea Cake’s beating nor disclosing her words at the trial. Although Janie returns to Eatonville alone, she returns as a strong, new woman. Hurston’s narrative advocates both freedom from sexist and racist harassment, and the rejection of community and cultural values that enforce such harassment. Hurston also presents an imaginative consciousness that speaks of wandering and independence in a time when women were somewhat restricted. In the end, Janie, like Hurston and many African American women of the twentieth century, becomes a woman who can think and act for herself.

Janie Crawford is surrounded by outward influences that contradict her independence and personal development. These outward influences from society, her grandma, and even significant others contribute to her curiosity. Tension builds between outward conformity and inward questioning, allowing Zora Neal Hurston to illustrate the challenge of choice and accountability that Janie faces throughout the novel.

Janie, as she is sitting under a blossoming pear tree, realizes that the entire natural world is marrying and giving itself in marriage. To Janie, marriage is synonymous with love. The incredibly extended metaphor of marriage and the natural world is the metaphor that the whole book is focused upon. As Janie is the main character, it shows that this love, this marriage, will also play deeply into Janie’s life. Through Hurston’s figurative language, Janie’s character is developed quite rapidly. The reader begins to realize that to Janie, nothing but marriage, and therefore love, matters to her. Through the extended metaphor that Janie speaks and is describing clues the reader into the fact that, while Janie has many, many other characteristics about her, her deep desire to love and be loved is really what makes Janie such a real character. Hurston doesn’t contain her use of figurative language to just one character, though. Both Janie’s second husband, Joe, and her third husband, Tea Cake, have an impressive amount of figurative language used to make them come alive. While Hurston doesn’t employ the same type of

     After the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, the ex-slaves could not find enough good work to earn a living. Jim Crow laws were installed to push blacks further away from reaching their dreams. These laws were enforced after Plessy v. Ferguson conviction that blacks and whites could have everything "separate but equal." This included schools, transportation, drinking fountains, bathrooms and more. By 1914 all towns were split down the middle with the blacks on one side and whites on the other (Hoobler 51). The Homestead Act was established in 1866 to help blacks grow in their society. Many bought their own farms or went North and learned to

The novel can be explains as Janie's attempt to find voices, that can speak for her. The conflict of being silenced by another is most illustrated in a relationship between Janie and her husband Jody. Janie leaves Jody because he wont listen to her. As you can see as Jody's power gets bigger and bigger, he forbids her to talk , Janie's silence increases power. This silence function has the process of gaining self awareness for Janie.

Hurston uses the actions of characters to establish the theme that one person cannot completely diminish another’s free will. Joe wanting to control Janie creates a battle against her desire for free will and a life created through her own decisions. For example, Joe shows his need to control Janie as he “ordered Janie to tie up her hair around the store” (Hurston 55). Joe is a very powerful man, even in the eyes of his own wife. He forces Janie to wear hair ties around the store against her own free will. This shows his initial need to overpower and control Janie extinguishing her free will. However, Janie’s free will eventually reigns victorious over Joe’s free will as he becomes very sick and less powerful. As his

Through images of Janie’s face and her clenched teeth, Hurston displays the will to fight slowly disappearing after one has been pushed for a long time in order to express the effect of oppression on a person. The internal fight of submission that occurs within Janie and the choice of whether or not to voice her opinion causes her to question Joe and what was really between them. Following years of conflict within herself and with her husband, Joe, Janie surrenders the fight to finding her voice. “So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush”(71). The use of the word “gradually” in the citation reveals that becoming silent for Joe’s sake was a slow process for Janie. Since Joe was able to back Janie into this corner and

Freedom is something that we struggle to strive since the day we step into this world. We can see in this book All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr that most of the characters are experiencing a common struggle is the ability to be free. One of the characters that I connect mostly with is Werner. Werner as an orphan while living in Hitler’s times his life, opportunities, and choices were limited.

In the chapter there are a lot of connections between the main text and the philosophical lessons. The philosophical lessons are about fate. “Fatalism is the belief that whatever happens is predestined. ”(Page 54) In other words, everything happens for a reason. The Greeks even believed that even “world history was governed by Fate, and that the fortunes of war could be swayed by the intervention of Gods.

Jean Jacques Rousseau stated that: “man is born free; but everywhere he lives in chains”. This suggests humankind is only free at the moment of birth and thereafter they live their lives chained down by forces working to hold them back from being who they truly are. Every man and women are shaped not by their freedoms, but by their limitations. This is evident in all types of literature and from observation of the world we live in now. However, I have chosen to analyze Prince Hamlet in Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Winston Smith in 1984 by George Orwell and lastly The Man in The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

In order to answer the question of what is required for an individual as he exists in society to be free, we must first understand what freedom is. In synthesizing ideas from the texts studied this semester, thus far, I have arrived at the conclusion that freedom can be described as the ability to pursue activities that fulfill oneself, and contribute to our own happiness, and self-actualization as an individual. To say that freedom can be “defined” would imply placing limits on freedom, and would be counterintuitive. Erich Fromm states that “[Freedom’s] meaning changes according to the degree of man’s awareness and conception of himself as an independent and separate being (23).” The less a person is bound to obligations albeit moral, economic, social, or political, and more self-actualized, the more likely he will be to seek happiness through activities that are free from influence of these aforementioned entities.

In the western world we have an innumerable amount of privileges and beneficial effects, which gives us a set of outstanding and exclusive options, that should not lightly be taken for granted. We are liberated and emancipated from the chains of indigence, which so many other countries in the east are bound of, consequently that means we are free to choose our own identity, our education and what we want to occupy ourselves with, our freedom of speech and in the light of that we are free to pursue our dreams and fulfill them. Or are we actually completely free? In the short story “A Gap of Sky” written by Anna Hope in 2008, the main character, Ellie, illustrates the abstract term of freedom and how it can be interpreted.