In the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the main protagonist, Janie, undergoes three marriages in which she changes and discovers her true self through the experiences that go on through her marriages and she realizes what she likes, doesn’t like, and inserts that into her personality and the way she perceives life. Throughout the book she uses metaphors that are written in a way that makes you think at first but once what is understood on what she’s trying to say, you see through her eyes what’s going on and she just doesn’t tell how she feels, she shows you how she feels.
For instance, in the first sentence of the book Janie talks about the horizon and how “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing,” (p.1) which symbolizes how there are two types of people. There are those who end up “coming in with the tide”, landing and accomplishing their dreams, and then there are those who keep on going farther and farther and are lost forever sailing and never accomplishing or landing to their dreams. When reading this quote, an image comes to mind, a sailor that wonders off never really having a destination or a sailor that knows where to go and how to get there and is focused as to where they end up. Janie gives this scenario and ties it with dreams and it’s just so clear on what she’s trying to demonstrate and get the reader to understand how people chose one way or the other to the way of their dreams.
Love is a big theme in the book. Janie as said undergoes three marriages and what she’s looking for was all influenced when “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree” (p.10) and “she saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in