In Their Eyes Were Watching God, when Janie runs away with Joe, she has a fresh start in life. However the sun does not rise on the horizons of her newfound dreams, instead she watches “the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged” (33). One reading of this can be  negative: foreshadowing her future days with Joe.

However, earlier passages night’s have more positive associations. Twilight’s coming actually brings people to life: “The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was time to hear things and talk” (1). During the day they were animals, “mules and other brutes…But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human” (1). Nights are often thought to be an end of something, but in Their Eyes Were Watching God, it seems nights are figured in as the beginning. After all, it is during nights when dreams are most vivid.

Maybe this is stretching the metaphor a little too far, but I remember that the sun is traditionally gendered male, while the moon is seen as female. I wonder if this somehow ties into the fact that the book opens with the statement of men of having no control over their dreams, while for women, “the dream is the truth” (1). Anyways, it’s interesting to keep these different binaries (man and woman, sun and moon, day and night) in mind while reading the book.