It is almost cruelly ironic how Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship comes to an end. Out of all of here husbands and relationships, Tea Cake was the only one who really loved Janie through and through. In regards to her previous husbands, she ran away from Logan, had to basically wait patiently for Jody to die as their relationship deteriorated, but with Tea Cake, she had to commit an act of violence, though that is the last thing she wanted to do, in order to protect herself. She was actually truly happy with Tea Cake and he with her, and that can be seen in the last scene that Tea Cake is coherent and not mad from the rabies. The fact that she has to plan out a “just-in-case” plan of having the 3 empty cartridges go off before Tea Cake can actually shoot her is almost desperately sad, as she tells herself that he would not actually harm her or try to shoot her, just scare her.

How are the reader supposed to feel about Tea Cake’s death and how it happened, along with the aftermath? Janie had to kill him, and, because of that, her love for him is put into question by the town and is only redeemed by his lavish funeral procession. But she actually goes to trial and during that time the whole town questions her love for him. When the funeral does happen, she is noted to not be dressed mournfully, because “she was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief” (pg. 189). The violence involved in Tea Cake’s death, Janie’s part in it, and her trial and grief afterwards, really throws into perspective all the feelings and emotions that she and the reader experience throughout the novel. With her other husbands, Janie feels undervalued, unappreciated, and unfulfilled, but with Tea Cake, she is whole, and yet he ends up acts violently and “ferociously” (pg. 182) towards her because of his sickness and she also must be violent towards him in order to live. The sad irony is that she and Tea Cake had true passion and love for each other and it ended up manifesting into “violence”, and that is how Janie’s story ends; she “survives” the death of her first dream (Logan), the death of a husband who had “rescued” her (Jody), but has to kill the one person that really loved her and made her happy (Tea Cake actually fulfills her “dream”). It is almost as if Janie gets the opposite of a happy ending; however she is content, as she has been to the “horizon and back” (pg. 191). According to what Janie says, the reader too should feel as peace as Janie does.