Chapters 1 & 2
This blog is supposed to mainly reflect the dialogue and use of language of the first two chapters, so I’ll try my best to stick to that topic rather than react to the plot of our new book itself. To start that off, I want to bring up a question that Senor W. told us to play around with: Is this, from what we’ve read so far, the most honest book we’ve read in class? From the language and writing style Hurston uses alone I definitely believe so. Some thought it was too controversial how Hurston depicted her characters and made them sound so uneducated by writing out dialogues how they actually spoke, but that just brings more honesty into the book. That was how people were in the rural parts of Florida, and that was how they talked. Simple as that. If we were learning about the characters and their backgrounds in any other way, I do not think that the book would have the same oomph as it does — it would just be a piece of well-written literature. Really, the way the characters talk is just as important as the book itself if it is to be taken seriously as a legitimate testament of how life was for some of the black people in rural Florida at the time. It would just be as if, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote the entire book in his own professional style and characters like Jim came off sounding much more educated than the readers. The message that Twain was trying to get across about blacks and slavery in the South simply would not have gotten across, and the same applies for Hurston. Honestly, if people find her novel too controversial in part because of the language used, they need to take a reality check.
Also worth pointing out about the language is the fact that the reader can trust what Hurston is saying more than the narrarators of the other novels we’ve read. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a third-person narrative, and in a third-person narrative the reader generally gets the impression of an unbiased, unintrusive invisible character looking down upon the characters and the plot and recording what they see. In first-person narrative, it obviously is told from the perspective of one character so their view on what is taking places is ought to be skewed — for instance, Nick Carraway thought he was the only honest person he knew, and Ishmael kept making himself out to be this important part of the Pequod when he was really just an amateur first-timer on a whaling ship.
