Journal #1

I really liked the activity we did about the first page of a book the other day, so I'm going to start talking about the narrator by only looking at the first page.  Most of chapter one is dialogue anyway, and one of the only huge chunks of narration is on page one. Hooray.

Right off the bat I can tell that this book is going to be largely about the female experience.  The very first paragraph of the novel is a statement about men.  That statement is followed with one about women, which offers great contrast.  This might be compared to the differences between the roles of males and females that are seen throughout the entire book, but all that fun stuff comes later.   One of Hurston's first statements in the novel is about women, and the first character introduced is a woman.  So far, and I definitely don't feel like I'm stating the obvious by saying so, this is a book about women.

This book is written in the 3rd person narrative.  As far as I can tell she (I'm calling the narrator a she because she likes to talk about women... oh and a woman wrote the book) is the omniscient type of narrator because she gives us a little bit of insight into the characters thoughts and feelings.  An example of this can be seen on page 2 when Hurston writes, "Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times"(Hurston, 2).  Correct me if I'm wrong on the type of narrator.  I'm thankful that I didn't have the opportunity to confuse all 2 billion of them on the literary terms quiz.

The narrator likes to use figurative language in her descriptions.  Hurston uses personification to say that words walk without masters on page 2.  When I read this I wondered if it was an allusion to slavery. My favorite bit in chapter one was on the first page when she compared the townspeople sitting on their porches to mules.  That would be a comparison, another literary term.  Learning is so great.

Based on her dialogue and other characters' reactions to her, I would make the judgement that Janie is a fairly grounded person who knows what she wants out of life.  She's at least 40 according to the nice folks on the porch, so it's safe for a first-time reader of this book to assume that she's had plenty of life experiences.  Money isn't a concern for Janie.  She makes this clear by saying, "...Ah ain't got nothing to make me happy no more where Ah was at"(Hurston, 7).  Janie has $900 dollars in the bank that she and Tea Cake had saved.  If she had wanted to, Janie could have made a very nice living for herself with that money.  My guess would be that her experiences with Joe ruined the concept of money for her and that she became less of a material person throughout the course of that relationship.