Preview

Dialects In Their Eyes Were Watching God By Hurston

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
313 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Dialects In Their Eyes Were Watching God By Hurston
Hurston uses dialect in her novels to enable the user to have a deeper insight into the culture in which the novels are set. Dialects are used to preserve oral traditions of a particular group. She uses dialect to preserve the African-American oral traditions to be passed on to the reader. The use of dialect makes the characters more interesting, especially to the African-American society. It is obvious that the book was meant for a black audience who read using the southern dialect among blacks to spice up the story. The black southern dialect adds authenticity to the characters making them interesting and easy to relate to. Dialect makes the characters seem real and believable. In "Their eyes were watching God" dialect is used to portray

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Modern African American Literature was formed under a stressful time for Africans, slavery. The only way the stories of the indigenous people of Africa were passed down was through oral recollections, or stories of the events. In America this was especially difficult for the slaves because of laws preventing them from learning English. By not being allowed to learn English, the slaves had to learn English solely on auditory purposes. This essentially made the slaves illiterate. When the slaves transferred the language that they heard to paper, a new style of language was formed which was referred to as dialect. Dialect is what the slaves thought they heard and the correct spelling of those words,…

    • 355 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Responsible Of the Failed Marriage In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, main character Janie’s husband, Logan, is portrayed as a villain in their marriage to justify her leaving him for a new man. She establishes his bad behavior when she compares him to a Bear: “Logan with his shovel looked like a black bear doing some clumsy dance on his hind legs” (Hurston 31). Janie suggest Logan has animalistic characteristics, the comparison shows how Jamie fells about him.…

    • 310 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the historical fiction novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston tells a story about misinterpretation of love and dreams. Janie is an African-American woman in the 1930´s who experiences life through a series of unsteady relationships, all in search of a love like her dreams. Janie fails to realize the difference between love and her dream, specifically when she is steered away from her dream by others, marries Logan Killicks and runs off with Joe Starks. Janie has a dream about marriage, but is soon pushed in the opposite direction by the people around her.…

    • 537 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In each novel there are characters that have to accomplish quests in order to reach self realization and to show the development of this particular character. In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston makes good uses of literary devices like personification, figurative language, and tone to help enhance the development of Janie’s character to reach self realization.…

    • 554 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston, the spoken words of the characters are often simple and rough. Hurston uses vernacular dialect in order to preserve the culture of southern blacks in the early twentieth century.…

    • 502 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Hurston's literary work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she employs the use of southern dialect in her characters dialogue. Hurston uses the dialect to convey the personality of her characters while adding to the feeling of a story that is being told. The dialect helps the reader feel like the novel has come to life before them and they mentally attribute different surrounding backgrounds to Hurston's characters, while taking in the meanings and significance behind Janie's life story of love and experiences. Additionally, Hurston uses dialect to capture the beauty of the instruments of nature in her book and express artistic images to her readers while conveying symbolism simultaneously.…

    • 648 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God features a distinctive narrative structure that orbits the life of a female protagonist attempting to function autonomously in a society where white men typically have control. Janie dreams of a marriage full of authentic love and respect, and when her reality differs from her dreams, she revaluates her relationships. Although she may not find the life she has fantasized about, Janie is willing to shift the dynamic between herself and the men around her, creating the opportunity for her aspirations to become her emerge in the real world. In the frame narrative, both Zora Neale Hurston and Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods detail Janie’s life experiences.…

    • 575 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes are Watching God, there is lots of imagery about Janie’s emotions and personality. Janie is a free-willed person who doesn’t care what other people think and that is shown through Tea Cake and her friends. She is trying to find herself in the book and who she is supposed to be. She is also trying to figure out love throughout the novel. When she is young, she thinks she figured out love and that is shown through nature. At the end of the novel, Janie has showed the readers that love takes time and there are many ways to show it. In her case, she showed love and emotion through nature. Nature is a larger factor in the novel that represents Janie’s personality throughout. Nature is a large part of…

    • 1572 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Fly Girl Summary

    • 476 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The author of this book used 1960 dialect and a southern twang so it can go with the setting. She used a simile here and there but that’s pretty much it. I really liked the book because it talked about topics that fascinate or intrigue me. I give it 4.5 stars because there were something’s that confused me or I didn’t understand.…

    • 476 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Zora Neale Hurston Dialect

    • 1463 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Hurston showed many examples of rural Southern black dialect very frequently in her novel. In Their Eyes Are Watching God, Hurston has a very interesting use of language. The characters in the novel don’t speak the way you would see in typical American literature. Hurston shows the many different cultures rich voices of Janie’s world by making their distinctive grammar, vocabulary, and tone mark different in order to show their individuality. Jody Starks was very hungry for power and was willing to travel to quench this hunger. As a result of his foolish power hungry mentality, his relationship with Janie quickly went south as he treated her very poorly. Eventually, this began to show when Joe says “"All you got tuh do is mind me. How come you can’t do lak Ah tell yuh?" "You sho loves to tell me whut to do, but Ah can’t tell you nothin’ Ah see!" "Dat’s ‘cause you need tellin’," he rejoined hotly. "It would be pitiful if Ah didn’t. Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves"(Hurston 66). The very common theme of rural Southern black dialect is shown here. The main focus is how he restrained Janie from being able to find her voice. Joe was constantly telling Janie what to do, and not only insults Janie but the demographic of women entirely. He’s very confident that women are not able to commit actions on their own and that they…

    • 1463 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the first few paragraphs of Hurston’s essay, she depicts an easygoing first 13 years of life. She remembers watching white travelers pass through her small town, and how she would welcome them with a bright, cheery smile. She talks about the white folk even giving her pocket change when she made them laugh, or followed them a distance alongside their horses. More importantly, she notes that in her younger years she felt no different while in the presence of a white person, and the only notable difference they shared was that they did not live in the same town. Hurston lived in an exclusively colored area growing up. To her, the Caucasian strangers were merely occasional pass-byers. Before she realized that race played such an enormous factor in the real world, as a child, she saw no superiority in the White man. Everybody was one people.…

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In his review, Wright also claims that Hurston is “exploiting the phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’…

    • 1206 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Hurston knew herself, that she is an individual. She is an inspiration to American readers and became known as a huge influential figure in the history of African-American literature. Reading her work today has a large impact on the reader to show how hard it was to be a successful African-American, and live through segregation. Although she ended her life with little money, she now is honored through our studies and awe in her…

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Hurston depicts herself as a confident young women through the use of metaphors, while also explaining the proudness she holds for being African American. For example, the quote “But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.”, Hurston explains that she is not longer affected by her family's past as slaves, and that she’d rather forgive…

    • 542 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    Zora Neale Hurston Essay

    • 1801 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Zora Neale Hurston wrote her stories from an “insider’s” perspective. Her effective use of black dialect in her writings of “Sweat,” “The Gilded Six-Bits,” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” often created a superficial realism which, by verging on racial stereotyping, overlooks the experiences and motivations of her characters (Cornish)<http://www. csmonitor.com/1985/0531/dbspun-f.html>. The writings of the author not only included the linguistic structure of dialect----i.e, grammar (specifically morphology and syntax) and vocabulary (David Crystal)<http://www.britannica.com/topic/dialect>, but the English phonology of words (Ah’m, ain’t, dat, “Ah done tole you…”). Writing a thesis on the writings of author Zora Neale Hurston’s use of linguistic elements in relationship to her style of writing required the use of my course textbook, “How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction,” written by Anne Curzan and Michael Adams. In Chapter 12 of the textbook a discussion of American Dialects stated, “In the twenty-first century, American speakers may poke at the drawl of Southerners” (Curzan and Adams 377); a culture and dialect frequently written about by Hurston. Hurston wrote masterfully within the folk idiom that she was heavily influenced by (Cornish)<http://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0531/ dbspun-f.html>. Writing the dialect of an uneducated black people not only was appropriate to their rural existences and experiences, but also, provided insight into her choices which mattered in the final result of her writings.…

    • 1801 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Best Essays