Rhetorical Analysis Essay Example for Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of one black woman’s attempt to realize her dreams and to achieve happiness in her life. Throughout the book, the reader follows Janie Woods as she travels from one man to the next and from one town to the next in search of happiness, freedom, and love. Janie abandons her first husband and the oppressive, conventional life that she lives with him in order to pursue a more stimulating, adventurous, and exciting one with Jody Sparks. With his big dreams for the future and his plans to build an “all-colored” town, Jody seems at first to

embody the very things that Janie is seeking in life, but he very quickly turns out to be as

oppressive and restrictive as Janie’s first husband. When he dies, however, both Janie and the reader become acquainted with Tea Cake, a relatively poor yet nonetheless charming man who professes his love to Janie and asks her to run away with him to the Everglades. Janie does, and it becomes clear that Tea Cake and Janie are the perfect fit. With Tea Cake, Janie is happier than she has ever been, and it seems that she will finally achieve her dreams. When Tea Cake becomes infected with rabies and shoots at Janie with a gun, however, Janie is forced to kill him in a devastating twist of plot. Afterwards, Janie is thrown into jail and then tried by jury in order to decide if she will be convicted of murdering Tea Cake. If she is convicted, her life and her quest for happiness and the pursuit of her dreams will be destroyed. If she is allowed to go free, she can continue her life and her quest for happiness. In this pivotal courthouse scene, the climax of the story of Janie’s struggle to achieve happiness and the deciding moment of her fate, Zora Neale Hurston uses figurative language, varied sentence structure, and a unique, circular kind of organization of the passage in order to build tension and suspense and to create a vivid image of the courthouse and of