On Narrative Strategies Of Their Eyes Were Watching God

America is a pluralistic country, on one hand, each people, such as Asian Americans, African Americans, Spanish Americans and native Americans, is actively accepting or being passively assimilated by the European American culture, on the other hand, they are making great effort which is partly embodied in literary works to maintain and enrich their culture. African American literature is not only a branch of Europe American literature, but also a further development of African American oral tradition. As a wonderful works of American literature garden with hundreds of flowers, African American literature sends out unique glamour.Their Eyes is Hurston's best legend. Its language is poetic and musical; it is organized loosely but not incoherent. Sparkling discourses of the novel are extensively humorous and harmonious in the whole text, in which a large number of black people's dialects and idioms are used to display the potential beauty of black language and culture heritage.In my thesis, the focus is put on the narrative strategies in terms of narrative structure, narrative language, and narrative technique employed in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes, by analyzing, my purpose is to excavate the blackness embodied in its works, give an account of the functions of black unique language, folk custom culture in molding the characters and deepening the theme of the novel.In the first chapter of this paper, my attention will be devoted to the narrative structure of the novel. The narrative structure of Their Eyes is a tale within a tale. It totally consists of twenty chapters, the first chapter and the final three pages inchapter twenty constitute a big frame of story telling, it is narrated by an omniscient third person voice, the second chapter and the first two pages in chapter twenty form the main body of the story, or the story within the story, which is told by Janie, the heroine of the story, in a late night. Janie speaks "full of that oldest human longing-self-revelation" after suffering so much in her life. Phoeby, her close friend and ideal listener, listened hungrily. In a sense, it's Phoeby who helps Janie to retell her story.With the help of Janie, Hurston retells the story of Janie herself. The story begins at her grandmother's house, ends in the death of her third husband, Tea Cake. Hurston describes the growth course of Janie from a young girl to a black mature woman, which is also an evolution for Janie from dependence to independence, from reticent "object" to articulate "subject." Such narrative structure has already existed in the folktales, as an anthropologist and black folklorist, it is extremely natural for Hurston to adopt such kind of narrative structure, which plays a crucial role in inscribing the personages and themes of the novel. Besides this, the narrative structure of the novel has already existed in the black folk stories; we can find the correspondence between them. Janie returns home after three expeditions as the hero of the black folk stories does.In the second chapter of this paper, I will mainly discuss the use of narrative language in the novel. Hurston uses a great number of free indirect discourses, which are also the most striking and successful aspect of its narrative tactics. Henry Louis Gates demonstrates that it is Hurston who introduces free indirect discourse into African American narration.While Janie seeing a bee adopting honey among the pear trees, while Joe meeting Janie for the first time.Hurston does use the free indirect discourses to portray Janie's keen wishes for true love and the identity and character of Joe.So sweet languages can be overheard everywhere between the lines of the whole story, which reduces the distance between the readers and the text, making the readers sense the minds and emotions of the characters involved in the story.Another remarkable feature of its narrative language is the employment of black unique rhetorical, grammatical and lexical expressions. Metaphor, double descriptive and verbal noun are all instances of black...