Journal #6 Their Eyes...

Alliteration: “He wouldn’t dig potatoes, and he wouldn’t rake hay: He wouldn’t take a whipping, and he wouldn’t run away.” 

Hyperbole: “The porch was boiling now.”

In this passage Jody and other people from Eatonville are on the porch socializing when Mrs. Tony Robbins, “Jody was on the porch and the porch was full of Eatonville as usual at this time of the day.” In this key passage the motif of the porch is used once again. The porch represents the guidelines on who Jody accepts and respects in town. Most of the time Joe will go out on the porch to chat with friends and other people from Eatonville. Throughout Jody and Janie’s relationship, Janie tries to gain Joe’s respect and enter the porch territory. Unfortunately every time she does when Joe is around he demands that she go inside and work. Janie learns to keep her feelings towards Jody inside and to not argue with him to make him happy. But no matter how long she bites her tongue for, she would end up never gaining Joe’s respect. 

After a long day of work and socializing with Tea Cake, he goes home and Janie relaxes out on the shop porch on her own, “So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.” In this passage, Hurston uses imagery to highlight the importance of nature. Throughout the book Hurston describes nature through imagery to portray the mood at the time it is described. In this passage Janie had just finished spending the day with Tea Cake. By the way she describes the the moon’s “amber fluid” and how it was “quenching the thirst of the day” it is apparent that she very much enjoyed her day and Tea Cake’s presence. 

Some people from town, including Joe, are on the porch when Mrs. Bogle walks toward them, “She was a wind on an ocean. She moved men, but the helm determined the port.” In this passage Hurston uses a metaphor to describe Mrs. Bogle. She chose to use a metaphor to describe her to give the reader a better idea of who this woman is. By referring her to “wind on the ocean” in terms of men, the reader now understands that even though she was described as being old in the paragraph before this quote, she still has a control over men. This passage also gives the reader an understanding of how much Joe does not respect Janie, because right after Hurston describes how all the men think so highly of Mrs. Bogle, Jody orders his own wife to go inside and tend to this other woman.