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An Example of African American Narrative: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

This study explores an example of African American on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God which is considered as a speakerly text and the search for identity and self-understanding of an African American woman. This quest for self-knowledge directs attention to itself as a central theme of the novel by certain narrative strategies. This text seems primarily to be oriented toward imitating one of the numerous forms of oral narration to be found in classical Afro-American vernacular literature. Therefore, we think to listen to the story instead of reading a novel. In this essay, I focus on the use of the narrative frame and of a special form of plot negation. The heroine Janie narrated the tale of her (Crawford-Killicks-Starks-Woods) to her best friend, Phoeby. It also represents a resonant and authentic narrative voice that echoes and aspires the impersonality of the black vernacular tradition. African American tradition is collective compelling, and true somehow to the unwritten text of a common blackness. Also, this paper shows that the mode of narration of this novel consists of narrative commentary and characters' discourse. The ultimate sign of the dignity and strength of the black voice is the use of a dialect-informed free indirect discourse as narrative commentary beyond that which represents Janie's thoughts and feelings alone. As a result, narrative commentary and free indirect discourse move toward the indistinguishable and the final instance of free indirect discourse occurs in the novel's last paragraph, in which Janie finds her identity