Their Eyes Were Watching God Study Questions
AP Literature
On a separate sheet of paper, answer each of the following questions as specifically and thoroughly as you can (few
sentences each, not mini-essays ), using concrete details to support your answers where appropriate. I want to see
that you’re thinking as you answer these, but don’t stress if you don’t know an answer to a specific part of a question.
Just answer each question as fully as you can.
Also, as you read, note examples of figurative language. Pay special attention to descriptions of the road, ships, trees,
the sun, eyes, time, God, dreams, judgment, speech, silence, or mules.
Feel free to annotate/note passages that you think are important with post-it notes as you read.
Before Reading
1. If you could only tell your life story to one person, to whom would it be? Where would you begin? What specific
images and experiences would you describe? Why?
Chapter 1
1. Why does Hurston open the novel with an analogy in the first two paragraphs? What authorial purpose does it
serve?
2. How does Hurston’s narrative voice differ from the dialogue of her characters? Why would Hurston use
Southern black idiom to tell her story?
3. What conclusion can you draw about Janie Starks, her character, and the events in her life based on the dialogue
of her neighbors/ the porchtalkers? In what sense does the novel begin at the end of Janie’s story? What is the
literary term for this type of structure?
4. Why does Janie choose to tell her story only to her best friend Pheoby? How does our audience (especially
friends) affect what we reveal or conceal?
5. Janie is judged throughout the novel. In the first chapter, who judges her, and why? How does Janie respond?
Chapter 2
1. Consider how Janie’s point of view affects the way this story is told. How can an omniscient narrator tell the
story at the same time that the noel’s heroine, Janie, also tells her story? Do these voices reflect different parts
of Janie, or does the omniscient narrator reveal another force in Janie’s universe? Explain.
2. Why does she begin her narrative with the pear tree? How does the pear tree symbolize Janie’s quest for selffulfillment?
3. How does Hurston reveal Nanny’s motivation for forcing Janie to marry? Is that motivation pure, malevolent, or
something in between? Explain.
Chapter 3
1. How, and why, do Janie and Nanny differ in their ideas of love?
2. Describe the prevailing tone of this chapter. Identify the elements that set the tone.
Chapter 4
1. Five significant characters have been introduced by the end of Chapter 4: Janie, Pheoby, Nanny, Logan, and Joe.
List what motivates each of these characters.
2. What does Joe (Jody) Starks represent to Janie?
3. How does Jody’s character begin to establish Hurston’s theme of male dominance and aggression? Contrast this
with Janie’s first husband, Logan Killicks.
4. What symbolic meaning does the horizon begin to assume?
5. How could both Logan and Joe represent character foils to Janie? How do they each reveal different sides of
Janie? Explain.
6. To what extent does Janie acquire her own voice and the ability to shape her own life by this point in the novel?
How are the two attributes related?
Chapter 5
1. What type of power does Jody come to represent in the scheme of the book?
2. In what ways does Hurston relate power to language? (letting certain characters speak at certain points in the
novel and silencing them in others).
3. How does Jody attempt to control Janie? Does he ultimately succeed? Why or why not?
4. What does Janie’s hair symbolize?
5. How might the street lamp be symbolic? How does the text suggest that it is more than an ordinary street lamp?
How might such reference to light be symbolic?
Chapter 6
1. Why do you suppose Hurston uses the third person narrator to reveal what Janie is thinking while using dialogue
to allow us to get to know her husband and the other Eatonville residents?
2. What is the significance of Janie’s verbal outburst to the gathering on the porch?
3. What conflict does the conversation between Pheoby’s husband and Lige Moss center around? How is it
significant to the developing theme of the novel?
4. What motivates Jody to suppress Janie?
Chapter 7
1. In what ways does Janie reassert herself in this chapter? How does Jodie react to it?
Chapter 8
1. What do the following metaphors that begin Chapter 8 suggest? “He had crawled off to lick his wounds.” “But
the stillness was the sleep of swords.” “Well, if she must eat out of a long-handled spoon, she must.” (pg 81)
2. What does the narrator reveal about Jody that Janie does not know? How is the couple’s situation ironic? What
type of irony is it?
Chapter 9
1. Why does Janie burn her head rags?
2. What does Janie hate her grandmother? Do you think this feeling is justified? Why or why not?
3. Explain what Hurston means by saying that Nanny choked Janie with the horizon. Did Nanny intend to hurt
Janie?
4. How does Hurston weave folklore into this chapter?
5. Why does Janie discourage all of her suitors?
Chapter 10
1. Why is the checker game between Janie and Tea Cake significant?
2. Describe the overall tone of this chapter. How do the attitudes of Janie and Tea Cake affect the tone?
Chapter 11
1. What is the significance of the return of the pear tree symbol on page 106? Why was it not present in Janie’s
marriage to Jody or Logan? Think about her original youthful dreams.
2. What conflict does the first paragraph on page 108 reveal? Analyze the tone of the paragraph as well. What
element creates the tone?
Chapter 12
1. How does Pheoby play the role of devil’s advocate in this chapter?
2. Compare and contrast Janie’s feelings toward the community—as represented by the porch gatherers—when
she was married to Jody and now that she is with Tea Cake.
3. What factors allow Janie to rediscover herself? Does her new-found freedom relate to her ownership of
property? How does Janie define freedom in her new life?
Chapter 13
1. After Tea Cake and Janie marry, why do you suppose she keeps silent about the $200 she has hidden in her
clothes? Is this behavior consistent with Janie’s character?
2. Explain the significance of Mrs. Tyler to the plot line.
3. What is significant about the fact that Tea Cake refuses to touch Janie’s money and insists that he will provide
for her?
Chapter 14
1. How does Hurston contrast the ideas of poverty and joy in this chapter? What do these contrasting ideas
represent to Janie?
2. How is this move to the Everglades significant to the structure of the narrative? What symbolic significance do
the Everglades take on?
3. What might Tea Cake’s teaching Janie to shoot symbolize? How is the fact that Janie becomes a better shot than
Tea Cake significant?
4. What is Hurston establishing by having Janie go out to work with Tea Cake? How is working with Tea Cake
different from her working with Logan or Joe?
Chapter 15
1. Why does Hurston devote this chapter to Janie’s jealousy of Nunkie?
Chapter 16
1. What subtle shift in narration occurs in this chapter? What authorial purpose does this change in narrative voice
serve?
Chapter 17
1. Is Tea Cake acting out of character when he beats Janie?
2. Why do you suppose Janie remains silent in the face of Tea Cake’s physical abuse?
Chapter 18
1. In the face of the hurricane, how does Tea Cake’s belief system reveal itself to mirror that of Jody Starks’?
2. What practical role does the hurricane play in the narrative structure of the novel and the development of the
novel’s theme of Janie finding her own voice and autonomy?
3. In what way is the hurricane the high point of Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship?
Chapter 19
1. What is the significance of the instructions given by the white workers to the black men they forcefully enlisted
to help bury the dead?
2. What do the circumstances of Tea Cake’s death illustrate about Janie?
3. Why does Hurston have Tea Cake’s death run as it does: the three empty chambers in the gun, Janie’s hesitation
to fire her rifle, etc.?
4. How does Hurston establish Janie’s powerlessness as a black woman in white society in the chapter?
Chapter 20
1. Besides Janie’s desire to plant the seeds in remembrance of Tea Cake, what do the seeds represent?
2. What unifying theme of the novel comes full circle in Janie’s revelations to Phoeby?
3. As Jane returns to the bedroom she last shared with Tea Cake, what symbolic quest finally ends?
4. Hurston enhances her frame narrative with her expert use of imagery. Relate the imagery with which Hurston
begins the novel with the imagery with which she closes the novel.
After Reading
1. What might be the meaning of the novel’s title? In what ways do the characters see and hear God? Does he
answer their questioning? What theme might the title suggest?
2. During which important moments in her life is Janie silent? How does she choose when to speak out or remain
quiet? Relate this to the power of language.
3. When Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published, Richard Wright notoriously condemned the novel for
carrying “no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a
white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” He believed that the novel’s lack of anger
was one of its greatest faults, as well as its “minstrel technique that makes ‘the white folks’ laugh.”
Do you agree with him? Why or why not?
4. On the other hand, Hurston said of her own work, “I tried . . . not to pander to the folks who expect a clown and
a villain in every Negro. Neither did I want to pander to those ‘race’ people among us who see nothing but
perfection in all of us.” She also once said, “I do not attempt to solve any problems [in my novels]. . . I tried to
deal with life as we actually live it—not as the sociologists imagine it.”
Do you think she achieved these goals? Why or why not?