This essay examines the symbolic significance of the horizon in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. By analyzing the horizon's physical properties — its position as a boundary between earth and sky, its perpetual presence, its unreachable yet guiding nature, and its association with sunrise and sunset — the essay argues that the horizon serves as a sustained metaphor for protagonist Janie's dreams, struggles, and personal transformation. Drawing on textual evidence and secondary scholarship, the paper traces how the novel's opening and closing images frame Janie's complete journey, showing how she moves from dreaming toward the horizon to ultimately pulling it in as her own.
The horizon is the line that forms the apparent boundary between earth and sky. It is as far as the eye can see — a point that appears reachable yet can never actually be traveled to. The horizon blurs at the meeting of earth and sky, is always present no matter where one stands or which direction one faces, and marks both where the sun rises and where it sets, representing a process coming full circle. These physical properties of the horizon are all directly relevant to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The novel signals the importance of the horizon by beginning and ending with it. In the opening pages, Hurston writes:
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time (Hurston 1).
This ship represents Janie's hopes and dreams — far away and not always easy to see, and yet always present. The suggestion that the ships will never land "until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation" speaks to the capacity dreams have for staying alive, sailing forever as long as the dreamer can maintain hope. The novel ends with another reference to the horizon:
She pulled in her horizon 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! (Hurston 184).
Where Janie begins with her dreams on the horizon, she finishes by pulling them in. This symmetry shows that the horizon metaphor is central to Janie and her story, though it only hints at the full meaning the horizon carries throughout the novel. The horizon is a constant metaphor for Janie's journey, representing both who she is and how she changes as she completes her personal journey of understanding.
The horizon can first be understood as representing the boundary between earth and sky. This meaning deepens when the earth is understood as the real world and the sky as something beyond it. Hurston's use of the horizon as the place where dreams reside further suggests that the sky represents what a person hopes and dreams for, even when those hopes reach beyond the limitations of everyday life. With this understanding, the horizon represents Janie's journey to follow her dreams and to believe in them — and in herself.
Janie is unmistakably a character who dares to dream. This is a defining feature of her personality: regardless of how the reality of life tries to hold her back, she continues striving toward what she wants. This impulse begins with her experience beneath the pear tree, where she encounters a kind of revelation:
The inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation (Hurston 11).
This experience gives her an idealized vision of love and what she wants from marriage. Though two marriages fail to deliver that vision, she never fully surrenders her dream, and she eventually finds it with Tea Cake. This capacity to hope sets her apart from the other characters around her. As one commentator notes, her mother "does not see such promises on the horizon for herself or Janie. Her goal is to see Janie married not for love or for happiness but for safety and security" (Litkicks). Her mother's perspective is grounded entirely in reality. Janie, by contrast, sees reality clearly but is not afraid to look beyond it. That is why her eyes are on the horizon — the place where reality meets future possibility.
The next important dimension of the horizon is that it appears to be the furthest point one can reach, yet it is not a place one can actually travel to. The horizon also blurs at the line where earth meets sky. These qualities suggest that Janie's path is not clear or easily defined. While she does have a dream, it is not one she can reach by walking a straight line — nor is it one where she will necessarily know the moment it has been achieved.
This helps to explain Janie's struggles, particularly in her marriages. If her journey were clear-cut and what she wanted easy to articulate, she might not have married at all. Instead, she does marry, and she adjusts her life within those marriages. With Joe especially, she seems to relinquish her dream and surrender her independence. Yet she ultimately reclaims it when she speaks the truth to Joe on his deathbed. The horizon's quality of being distant and unreachable speaks to the way her dream functions in her life: it is a guiding force on the far horizon rather than a fixed daily destination. That is how she can stray from her dream and then return to it. Even after compromising her independence, she is able to look toward the faraway horizon, rediscover what lies out there, and rediscover her own needs in the process.
Another key feature of the horizon is that it is always present, no matter where you are or which direction you are looking. The horizon is one certainty that will always be there, whether or not you pause to notice it. This quality relates to trust — Janie's trust in herself and her trust in the processes of life. It also connects powerfully to the theme of fate and faith, and to the act of allowing things to unfold. This is made most explicit in the scene where Janie and Tea Cake shelter through the hurricane:
The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God (Hurston 151).
"Ever-present horizon tied to faith and trust"
"Janie integrates dreams and reality at journey's end"
Lillios, A. "'The Monstropolous Beast': The Hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." Southern Quarterly 36.3 (1998): 89–93.
LitKicks. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 2005.
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