The Title

Pre-reading Expectations


When I was looking through the list of books to choose the one to write a course paper on the one that caught my attention was Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. Firstly, the author’s name seemed very unusual, and then the title of the book was intriguing. It seemed like a very spiritual book. Eye is known to be a metaphor of soul, a mirror of soul, and the collocation of “their eyes” gives an impression of somebody who is distant. “They were watching God”, for example, wouldn’t have given such an impression. Also, the title makes one wonder, who can these mysterious “they” be if they can watch God? At least it’s said they were watching not his deeds, but Him. So the title made a very solemn impression, and the book was supposed to be about some spiritual issues.
After getting the first impression, I made an attempt to find out a little more about the author. Soon I learnt that Zora Hurston is actually a Afro-American novelist, folklorist and anthropologist, a star of Harlem Renaissance, and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is one of her best works, her most highly acclaimed novel, which tells a story of a woman’s maturation and spiritual growth. All this together with the first impression got from the title was actually very exciting.
Also it seemed to me that reading a book about spiritual problems and development by such a writer would help me or at least give me some clue to understanding a different mentality, a different structure of mind ad world outlook.

Post-Reading Understanding

After reading you find out that the title is a quotation from the book, from the chapter when the storm came and Janie, Tea Cake and Motor were sitting in the house hiding from it. There was nothing else they could do, because they hadn’t made a move earlier, with the Indians and the whites. “Ole Massa is doin’ His work now. Us oughta keep quiet.”
A 20th-century psychoanalytic Jaspers concluded that “the genuineness, the authenticity of human entity reveals itself in frontier situations”. This means that the acquisition of essence, liberty, cognition of the outer world comes to a human being in the “frontier situations”: in the face of death, in suffering, through the feeling of guilt, in struggle, i.e. when a person finds himself/herself on a boarder between entity and non-entity.
This is exactly where the characters found themselves. And this is why their eyes were watching God. They were watching the will of the Powerful Master sway the destinies and they were realizing that this Power is far beyond human perception. Literally they weren’t really looking at anything; here “eyes” and “watching” come as metaphors of the souls and spirits of these humans realizing and obtaining their truth, God’s truth, the gospel truth.
“They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”