Their Eyes Were Watching God Literary Analysis

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This essay will discuss and critically analyse, how both of the protagonists in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and William Faulkner’s Light in August, are dealt problematic situations, and how these characters are linked between their problems and Southern History. This essay will discuss how Joe Christmas, and Janie Mae Crawford are persecuted and oppressed because of their skin colour in a ignorant white community. These two great protagonists tell their stories through memories of both horrific ordeals and fond remembrance. Not only has Sothern history shaped and changed the views of these characters, but it has been the people, that have grown up in the South, that have been moulded and shaped by this history, and have had learned nothing else, that have had changed these two characters beliefs and livelihoods. William Faulkner’s chief focus in many of his fictions has been the ascent and downfall of the American Southern society. At its most…show more content…
Light in August, however, though mostly paying attention on the havoc of racism in a singular consciousness, doesn’t leave its open element out of statement. Christmas’s voyage into shadows starts in an orphanage under the bloodcurdling watch of a mistrustful grandfather, when it reaches its concluding phase, there is yet again a wicked eye, but this time it is a communal one. The ‘organ’ of the lynch mob gathered around Joanna’s burning house. Between the ‘common’ racism of the white population, most often hidden but easily revivable in times of worry, and the dangerous, never narrowing racism of men like Hines or Grimm, the dissimilarity is at best one of quantity, and little is required to stop the difference. Racism in Jefferson is a constant and prevalent disease, to the contamination of which no one, whether white or black, is entirely
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