Currently,
because we have just started Their eyes
were watching God, and just finished analyzing Invisible Man, I noticed some important connections between the two
books through the first five chapters of Their
eyes were watching God.
The first similarity to Invisible Man which I saw in Their
eyes were watching God, was how the narrator’s start their respective
books. In the prologue of Invisible Man,
we see the narrator foreshadow his situation by telling the readers that he is an
invisible man, and leading us into the book by saying “But what did I do to be
so blue? Bear with me.”. Ellison then goes on to explain the narrator’s life to
show how people like him can become invisible. In Their eyes were watching God, I also saw a similar introduction
where Hurston foreshadows the book in the first paragraph. Hurston basically states
that most of the time men do not achieve their dreams, and their dreams stay
out on the horizon like a ship. But women never give up on their dreams, they
make their dreams the truth and “act on them accordingly”. The narrator then
goes onto give the example of Janie saying, “So the beginning of this was a
woman” (Hurston 1). This made it easy for me to make the connection that since women
never give up on their dreams, and that this book starts out with a woman, then
it must be about a woman who never gives up on her dreams.
Later
on in the book, I noticed the similarities in how both characters were treated
with some invisibility, through the process of achieving their dreams. In Invisible Man, the narrator’s goal is to
make an identity for himself, and by doing so he gets ridiculed. For example,
in the Battle Royal scene, when the narrator was making a speech to share his
thoughts on the advancement of African Americans, the white people there
constantly laughed, interrupted, and asked to repeat information multiple
times. The wealthy white men couldn’t care less on what the narrator was saying
because he was invisible to them. Comparatively, in the first scene of Their eyes were watching God, Janie’s was
struggling to achieve her dream of finding a man that she loved and could
marry. That becomes the reason she leaves Tea Cake and walks alone through the
town she lived in, wearing muddy overalls. Through this scene Janie is treated
with invisibility, by being made fun of by the local residents, and talked about
right tin front of her as if she’s another sub-human object. The only difference
which I found here was that Janie was aware of her invisibility, where as in Invisible Man the narrator wasn’t.
Another
similarity which I found through both novels so far, is that there have been
strong forces, which the main characters become passive to. In Invisible Man, the narrator is naïve to
the intentions of Bledsoe kicking him out of the school, and listens to his
advice to go to Harlem and get some discipline. While in Their eyes were watching God, Janie becomes controlled by her
Grandmother who forces her to marry Logan Killicks, even when Janie comes back
protesting that she’s not in love and cannot keep her marriage.
It
would be interesting to see how the end of Their
eyes were watching God plays out, and if it’s similar in any way to Invisible Man, because I am still finding
more similarities. For example, Janie recently is disillusioned with the thought
that she has to stay in marriage with Logan, and marries Joe Starks instead –showing
that she is still following her dreams--. This is just like in the Invisible Man when the narrator realizes
through Bledsoe’s letter, that he was sent to Harem so that Bledsoe could get
rid of him. From then on the narrator realizes the truths behind the forces he
has been blind to, and I hope that, similarly, Janie overcomes whatever manipulative
forces she encounters throughout the rest of the novel.
