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Name: ______________________
Guiding Questions: Excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Directions: Answer the following questions in two-three sentences using evidence from the text to support your answers.
1) Re-read the first three sentences of lines 1-24. What do the images in these sentences imply about how Janie is feeling about the funeral?
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2) In lines 1-24, Hurston’s syntax includes several fragments. How do these fragments affect meaning in this part of the text?
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3) In lines 24-43, why might Hurston have chosen to personify lonesomeness?
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4) Explain the metaphor of the “journey to the horizons” from lines 24-43.
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5) Refer to lines 44-60. What did Nanny do to Janie’s horizon? Which word choices communicate the hatred Janie feels
toward Nanny?
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Name: ______________________
Guiding Questions: Excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Directions: Answer the following questions in two-three sentences using evidence from the text to support your answers.
6) In lines 44-60, how does Hurston use contrasts to reveal Janie’s emotions?
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7) Which images of light/goodness and darkness/evil does Hurston use in lines 61-69?
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8) What do the images of light in lines 61-69 imply about Janie’s character? Refer also to lines 57-60.
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9) What effect does the shift from line 69 to line 70 have on the meaning of this text?
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10) Compare Janie’s attitude toward lonesomeness at the beginning of the excerpt to her attitude toward it at the end.
Does her attitude change?
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Name: ______________________
Guiding Questions: Excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Directions: Answer the following questions in two-three sentences using evidence from the text to support your answers.
Possible Answers:
1) Janie “starched and ironed her face,” which evokes an image of flattening it out. It appears that Janie is taking all of the emotions
out of her face, hiding them for the funeral, making her face “like a wall of stone and steel” that is a barrier to the emotions she has
going on underneath its “veil.”
2) Hurston uses fragments such as “Finish. End. Nevermore” prior to contrasting what is going on outside at the funeral and inside her
“expensive black folds” where there is “resurrection and life.” Even though the imagery found within these fragments is negative and
associated with ‘the end,’ Hurston’s juxtaposition of these ideas with “resurrection and life” reveal that this end is a positive one for
Janie—one of renewal, rather than sorrow.
3) Lonesomeness appears to represent Janie’s conversation with herself. As she’d “lie awake at night asking lonesomeness some
questions,” she is looking for answers about who she is. She goes on to question what she will do next and, in the meantime, realizes
she doesn’t want to find her mother and actually hates her grandmother—lonesomeness allows Janie to come to these realizations.
4) The “journey to the horizons” seems to represent Janie’s future as she looks forward to it. This future includes a “search of people”
and, because the horizon evokes an image of the sun, it has a positive connotation of hope and happiness.
5) Nanny “had taken the biggest thing God had ever made . . . and pinched it into a little bit of a thing that she could tie around her
granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her.” The words “pinched,” “little bit of a thing,” and “tight enough to choke her”
provide harsh images of Janie almost spitting the words as she realizes what her Nanny did to her “horizon,” her future.
6) Hurston refers to Nanny belonging to that “other kind” and even though Janie had found a “jewel inside herself,” the text states “but
[Janie] had been set in the market-place to sell.” Uses of the words “other” and “but” show contrasts between Janie’s ideas of the
horizon and love versus Nanny’s.
7) “Angels,” “glittered and hummed,” “sparks,” “shine,” and “song” are all images associated with light. “Jealous,” “chopped,” “beat
him down to nothing,” “lonesomeness,” “mud,” and “deaf and dumb” are all negative images associated with evil or darkness.
8) Janie had “tried to show her shine.” Like Man, who is referred to in these lines, it appears that Janie still has “sparks” even though
she has been beaten down, “set in the market-place to sell,” made to be “deaf and blind.”
9) It’s as if the author shifts from inside Janie’s mind as she lies awake at night thinking to the reality of the day. Once she realizes
what she does about her mother and Nanny, she also sees “her widowhood and property” as a “great challenge in South Florida.”
She’s realizing things in both her past and present situations.
10) In lines 24-43, it appears that lonesomeness is a negative thing because the house sometimes “creaked and cried all night under the
weight of lonesomeness.” During this time, Janie would lie awake at night and think about things and even realized her hatred toward
her Nanny, which is another negative image. However, by the end of the passage, Janie likes “being lonesome for a change,”
revealing that her attitude about lonesomeness from the beginning of the passage to the end seems to have shifted.
