Zora Neale Hurston's work provides the African-American community with a one of the first literary symbols of racial health - a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings. Appropriately, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, provides an enlightening look at the journey of one of these undiminished human beings, Janie Crawford. Janie's story - based on principles of self-exploration, self-empowerment, and self-liberation - details her loss and subsequent attainment of her independence of her own reality, as she constantly learns and grows from her difficult experiences with gender issues and racism in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston's grasp on the reader's imagination is demonstrated with her masterful use of imagery and phrasing. Janie's dialogue and vernacular carry the reader along with seemingly innocuous pieces of vivid perception. In reality Hurston has put the reader in such a position that they hardly realize they are ingesting something deep and true. Their Eyes Were Watching God recognizes that there are problems to the human condition, such as
Rather than self-destruct under the constant realities of racism and misogyny she receives throughout her life, Janie Crawford does the opposite at the close of Their Eyes Were Watching God. The novel's final image states what Janie does throughout the story - taking her difficult past in and growing stronger and wiser as a result of it. Author Zora Neale Hurston believed that freedom "was something internal.... The man himself must make his own
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