Comparing Invisible Man and Their Eyes Were Watching God

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.