T.S. Elliot writes: "what we call a beginning is often the end/ And to make an end
is to make a beginning./ The end is where we start from." In order to begin self
realization a person must first conquer a hindrance in their path. This idea is used to
portray the nature of Janie's "exploration" in There Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora
Neale Hurston. Through the use of style, setting, and symbolism, the reader can interpret
that the beginning of one's self-fulfillment comes from successfully overcoming one's
Throughout the novel Hurston utilizes the horizon as a symbol representing
Janie's dreams in order to reveal the realizations she comes to which enable her to start
her self fulfillment. At one point while she is married to Logan Killicks, Janie realizes
something about her marriage to Logan Killicks; "She knew that God tore down the old
world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form
with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. She knew now that marriage
did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman."(25) Janie had
expected marriage to grow into love, but her dream did not come to be. Hurston
compares Janie's unfulfilled dream to how the sun rises above the horizon every morning
to a new day- the sun shedding light on the her dream (or horizon). The purpose of this
being to expose the importance of revelation of discovering her dreams and achieving
them. Without the failure of her marriage to Logan Killicks, Janie would not have know
what to search for in her life. After Janie leaves with Jodie to escape her marriage to
Logan Killicks, she recognizes a familiarity about her new marriage, "They sat on the
boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which
the night emerged."(33) From the exp...