Their Eyes Were Watching God chap. 18-20
“The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizen like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, we find a tragic ending with Janie being forced to kill Tea Cake. In the end, after the trial, we have Janie laying in bed and thinking about Tea Cake. With Tea Cake dead, we see that he still lives on in Janie’s heart. It must take a strong being to still love a person after they have tried to kill you. Janie was able to see that it was just a part of the insanity of Tea Cake’s disease. Janie doesn’t really seem to be that lucky when it comes to marriges. The first two people she was married to just became jerks and wanted to control her. The one person who she actually loved ended up dying by her hand in self-defense.
The quote above holds significance in life. When it’s someone who has died, or you just never see anymore, it seems that we hold them in our memories. With Tea Cake dead, Janie still found peace within her love for him. The memories of him keep him alive. Many of us do this with loved ones who have passed. We can get weighed down with all of the grief from death, but thinking about the good times you’ve had with that person seems to make it more bearable. Janie seems really strong in the sense that she can get over things. Many characters we have read about, (such as Gatsby) have trouble letting go of things. Janie can find true gratification with her memories and love. Compared with all of the other characters that we’ve read about in this course, Janie seems to be the strongest and most enduring.
