AP English Literature and Composition · Unit 3

Before You Read: Narration, Voice, and Context in Their Eyes Were Watching God

A novel does not begin on its first page. It begins with what you bring to it. In Unit 3 you move from short fiction to a complete novel, which means living inside one character’s changing perspective for twenty chapters instead of twenty pages. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God rewards that commitment, but it asks three things of you on the way in. You need to understand how the story is told, how its people speak, and the world the story comes from. This chapter gives you those three keys before you turn to Chapter 1.

1. The Frame: A Story Told Backward

Their Eyes Were Watching God opens near the end of its own story. Janie Crawford, about forty years old, walks back into Eatonville, Florida, in muddy overalls, and the town watches her from its porches and judges what it sees. That night, on her back porch, Janie tells her whole life to her friend Pheoby Watson, who has brought her a plate of food and something rarer: a willingness to listen. Everything that follows, her childhood, her marriages, her losses, is the story Janie tells that night.

A story built this way is called a frame narrative: an outer story (the telling) wrapped around an inner story (the life being told). The frame changes how you read. You always know more than the porch sitters do, because you will hear what they never stop to ask. And the novel’s real question is never simply what happens to Janie. It is how Janie comes to understand what happened, and what it means that she, at last, is the one doing the telling. For most of her life, other people have defined her. The frame announces that those days are over.

2. Whose Voice Is This? Narration That Slides

The novel is told by a third-person narrator, and the narration itself is written in polished, poetic standard English. But watch closely and you will notice the narrator’s voice repeatedly leaning toward Janie’s mind, until the wording on the page begins to sound like Janie thinking. Literary scholars call this technique free indirect style: the grammar belongs to the narrator, but the thoughts, judgments, and flavor of the sentences belong to the character.

This matters because your understanding of every event in the novel depends on how close the narrator is standing to Janie at that moment. Sometimes the voice warms and leans in, and you experience the world as Janie does. Sometimes it pulls back to the colder view of the porch, and you see her as the town sees her. That distance, near or far, is never an accident. When you feel your sympathy shift as you read, check the narration first. Hurston has usually moved the voice, and moving the voice is how she moves you.

3. Reading Dialect: The Sound of Real Speech

If the narration is polished, the dialogue is not, and the difference is deliberate. Hurston spells her characters’ speech phonetically, the way Black Southerners of that time and place actually sounded: “Ah” for “I,” softened endings, grammar that follows the rules of spoken rather than written English. New readers sometimes stumble here. Read the dialogue aloud, or hear it in your head, and lean on context; within a chapter your ear adjusts and the lines begin to move at natural speed.

Understand what the dialect is for. Hurston trained as an anthropologist and traveled the South collecting Black folklore, and she regarded this speech as art worth preserving exactly as it sounded. The porch talk in Eatonville, the teasing, the storytelling contests, the verdicts handed down on neighbors, is a community thinking out loud, and it carries the novel’s humor and much of its wisdom. So the book runs on two voices: a crafted literary voice in the narration and a lived voice in the dialogue. Janie’s story, in large part, is the story of what happens between those two voices, and of the voice she is trying to claim for herself.

4. The World Behind the Story

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first self-governing, all-Black incorporated towns in the United States, and the Eatonville of the novel is her hometown reimagined. She studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, collected folklore across the rural South, and published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, near the end of the Harlem Renaissance. The novel drew mixed reviews in its day and slipped out of print; readers and scholars recovered it decades later, and it now stands as one of the essential American novels.

The world inside the book is rural Black Florida in the early twentieth century, which is to say a world standing one generation away from slavery. That distance is not background decoration. Janie’s grandmother, Nanny, was born enslaved, and what she survived shapes every decision she makes for Janie, including the decisions Janie resists. When you judge Nanny, and the novel will tempt you to, weigh her history before you weigh her choices.

Setting in this novel is never just where events happen. It is what a place teaches its people to value. The Eatonville porch rewards conformity, wit, and public reputation, and it punishes anyone, especially a woman, who steps outside its script. Keep that lens on from the first chapter: ask not only where a scene happens, but what the place is demanding of the people in it.

5. The Reader’s Toolkit

Four habits of attention will carry you through this novel.

Character. Readers learn who a character is from details: actions, dialogue, appearance, and the reactions of others. From those details you infer a character’s perspective, what she believes about the world, and her motives, what she wants and fears. Motives hide in inaction as much as action; what a character fails to do, or fails to say, is evidence too. And perspective is not fixed. Watch for the moments when a character’s way of seeing shifts, because in this unit’s texts the shift is usually the story.

Conflict. Conflict is tension between competing values. It can be internal, two values fighting inside one person, or external, a person pushing against outside forces that obstruct her: other people, a community’s rules, circumstance, nature itself. Real novels rarely run on one conflict at a time. Conflicts intersect, and a smaller conflict often exists to put pressure on the larger one.

Significant events. Not every event matters equally. An event is significant because of what it does: how it relates to the conflict and how it changes, or reveals, a character. A quiet conversation can outweigh a public spectacle. As you read, keep asking of each scene: what changed because this happened?

Setting. A setting includes the social, cultural, and historical situation surrounding the events, not just the scenery. Settings carry values, and characters are always in negotiation with the values of the places they live.

6. Two Images to Watch

The horizon. The novel opens by watching the horizon, where ships carry men’s wishes toward them or away from them forever, and it draws a famous contrast between how men and women hold their dreams. The horizon is Janie’s measure of a life: how far she can see, and whether she ever gets to sail toward it. Mark every return of the horizon. Hurston is keeping score.

The pear tree. Early in Chapter 2, sixteen-year-old Janie lies beneath a blooming pear tree and watches a bee pollinate a blossom, and the experience fixes in her mind an ideal of love: mutual, joyful, and alive, each partner giving and receiving. She will measure every relationship that follows against that tree. When a scene echoes the pear tree, or betrays it, Hurston is telling you how to judge what you are seeing.

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