Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is set in Florida during the late 1930’s about a woman telling her story to a young girl about how she turned her life around. The novel is set up as a frame, in which the story starts and ends the same way, with only a couple hours going by. Janie and Pheoby are sitting outside on the porch, while Janie is telling a story. The story is the novel, but in the end, only two hours had gone by and both women are sitting in the same rocking chairs as they had in the beginning of the story. “Naw, Ah thank yuh. Nothin’ couldn’t ketch me dese few steps ah’m goin. Anyway mah husband tell me say no first class booger would have me.(12)” The word usage throughout this novel is uneducated with African-American southern style. Zora uses this type of literature showing that the characters are nothing more than a small town people. During the 1930’s, African-American people did not have many rights anyway, the education of proper speaking was not taught to them. They learned to speak and had no further lessons on how to correctly sound or talk.
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Zora used southern drawls like “naw,” indicating the southern accent along with the illiterate speaking. She chose to write it improper because it would change the factor in the story. The way each talked was part of how and why the story continued the way it did. Each chosen word was in for reasons showing where they are from, how they lived, and what they
Zora used southern drawls like “naw,” indicating the southern accent along with the illiterate speaking. She chose to write it improper because it would change the factor in the story. The way each talked was part of how and why the story continued the way it did. Each chosen word was in for reasons showing where they are from, how they lived, and what they