Exploring Gunnar's Celebrity

Gunnar discovers his identity quickly but isn't happy with how people react positively towards his talents. His poetry and basketball playing propels him to unusual heights of celebrity status but the adoration he receives makes him feel depressed. Gunnar's dissatisfaction could be linked to the patronizing quality of the crowd at the Shakespeare monologue contest, where the people there mocked Scoby by cheering for him. But I feel like this doesn't apply to the context of his fame, as the people around him aren't pitying him. Maybe it's the superficiality of some of the adoration that bothers him: people think they are like him but they're not because they haven't actually experienced the ghetto like he has. I think of this because of the reaction to Gunnar's poetry that's seen when he goes to his first college class, where everybody seems to be a huge fan of his work. Their praise of his poetry is an exaggerated, satirical portrayal of white people responding to a black artist's work, as one person says "I thought that if I mentioned a black poet, I wouldn't be taken seriously by the rest of the class." After Gunnar strips the students ask if they can keep his clothes because they'll be worth a lot someday, suggesting that they see him only as an entertainer while furthering the absurdity of the scene. However, this behavior doesn't represent all of Gunnar's fans as he has a massive following in the area he grew up in (which is where people started paying attention to him in the first place) and they don't say things like "I could welcome home an Ashanti warrior returned from the hunt with a fresh kill" (179).
During Gunnar's first organized basketball game, he notices how much control he has over the crowd's emotions, while caring little about winning the game himself. Despite that, he and Scoby become the "main attraction" in their school and in a sign of things to come, Scoby breaks down over the attention he's getting. Gunnar makes an observation that as a black person, he (and Scoby) "can't go back home and blithely disappear into the local populace. American society reels you back to the fold" (119). This idea ties into the rest of the novel as the adulation keeps growing to the point where Gunnar's influence is so profound that people are moved enough by what he says to end their lives. As his college class demonstrates, he can't get away from it.

Message in Their Eyes Were Watching God

One of Richard Wright's criticisms of Their Eyes Were Watching God was about how it didn't have an important message, stating that there's "no theme that lends itself to significant interpretation." However, I personally saw in Janie's final words to Phoeby an affirmation of some important ideas, one of which I think is summed up well with the lines "you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh" (192).

 I take this to mean that you need to live life in order to understand it, and nobody else can do this for you. Janie's past experiences, which form the narrative of the novel, all back up this idea. As a teenager, Janie realized that she wanted to experience the world and find love and connection with other people, but her grandmother made her live under her narrow perspective of what life has to offer by arranging her marriage with Logan. "Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon–for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you–and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her" (89). Janie left Logan for Jody, but in their marriage she was instead confined by Jody telling her to live under his expectations of what a mayor's wife should be. Janie feels unfulfilled, wanting to take part in the conversations on the porch of the store but unable to do so because of Jody's insistence that she keep to herself.
When Janie starts spending time with Tea Cake, she tries out new things that she hadn't done before like playing checkers and shooting with guns. She doesn't have to stay off on the side when she lives on the muck with him, both working in the fields and taking part in social gatherings. When she returns to Eatonville after his death, she is in grief but her words to Jane makes her seem wiser and fulfilled. Her house, which she previously disliked being in, "tasted fresh again." 

The presence of the townspeople gossiping about Janie's return can be likened to the critics that faulted Hurston for writing the way she did. Janie's response is to let them talk, as she herself knows that whatever they say doesn't change what she has learned about living.