ntegrating the immensity and intimacy of experience in the unfolding of the story of her life (106).Janie has worn her path and has discovered that only she can determine where it leads. She has been to the horizon and has become more aware of life and her inner-self. Janie is proud of who she has become in an existence full of mental, physical, and verbal abuse. She has come to be an independent woman with voice, identity, and a conscious. Janie now knows the truth and love of what life is made up of. “Increasingly Janie’s identity comes not in rebellion against someone else, but from the pleasure she takes in her reencounter with the world. Left to herself, she will not sit anywhere; hers is to explore, to move out from the sanctum of the pear tree” (Callahan 106).Searching for an Inner-SelfIn the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston a young girl named Janie begins her life unknown to herself. She searches for the horizon as it illustrates the distance one must travel in order to distinguish between illusion and reality, dream and truth, role and self” (Hemenway 75). She is unaware of life’s two most precious gifts: love and the truth. Janie is raised by her suppressive grandmother who diminishes her view of life. Janie’s quest for true identity emerges from her paths in life and ultimatly ends when her mind is freed from mistaken reality.Failing to recognize herself as the one black child in a photograph, Janie begins her story without a name or color (Meese 62). “Dey all uster call me Alaphabet’ cause so many people had done named me different names” (Hurston 9). The revelation doesn’t devastate Janie, rather it stands as both a symbol of Nanny’s unrealistic attempts to shield the girl from life and a metaphor for Janie’s lack of self-knowledge (Williams 100). Nanny raised Janie through her own dreams “of what a woman ou...
