At the end of The Sun Also Rises and Their Eyes Were Watching God, the female protagonists step away or are forced to step away from male protagonists. Janie Crawford shoots Tea Cake and Brett Ashley sends Pedro Romero (and possibly Jake Barnes) away. Discuss the reasons why the authors, Hurston and Hemingway, make these decisions. Do you find any similarities in their treatment of gender relations?
Fitzgerald’s narrator at the end of The Great Gatsby meditates on the American dream. How does this dream compare to the African-American American dream as embodied by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois? Compare/contrast Washington and DuBois’s vision of the dreams with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use.”
