The Narrators voice in TEWWG

The narrators voice can take on many different forms. The dramatized narrator is hardly ever seen as a narrator. Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, the story is narrated different ways.  The narration of the woman on the porch allows the reader to see what kind of woman Jennie is, and how we are to view her. “What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls?  Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?”

From this we learn that she is an independent woman and is not concerned with what others think of her. She is confidant of who she is, but she has not always been that way.

As a girl she has to come to grips with who she is. “So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me.”  Janie narrates herself as she describes her growing up years with whites, dressing as a white, not knowing she is black.

Then she looks to marriage thinking that it will lead to love and happiness. After being unhappy in one marriage, she movies to another man. He is not much better than the first one.

 We see different narrators telling Jennie’s story; how she is seen by others, and is how the reader will see her. We learn more about Jenie with the people she is round.

Booth says in his rhetoric book. “We should remind ourselves that many dramatized narrators are never explicitly labeled as narrators at all. In a sense, every speech, every gesture, narrates; most works contain disguised narrators who are used to telling the audience what it needs to know, while seeming merely to act out their roles.”