Their Eyes Were Watching God contains the narrator's and author's perspectives on the then-unusual role of gender and how it is interpreted in the novel . The opening line sets the tone for the novel and the character Janie Crawford, it may insinuate parallel worlds between her and the character Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. If parallels are to be drawn with the characters in the two novels respectively, then the lines “Distant ships carry every man's desires on board. For some they come with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher looks away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. Such is the life of men,” would refer to Jay Gatsby, in more ways than one, both literally and figuratively. The second part of the opening paragraphs of Their Eyes Were Watching God would be closely tied to Janie Crawford, when the narrator says, "Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember all they don't want." forget. The dream is the truth. So they act and do things accordingly. The quote could translate to this: when a man's dream is unattainable or far away, men are more realistic than women. A man can distinguish between what his dreams are and what reality actually is in his life. The quote can also be broken down to mean that men never actually achieve their dreams, nor try to achieve them, instead opting to accept their fate and move on with their lives, coming to terms with reality and living their lives . Jay Gatsby, although it can be said that he has achieved part of his dreams, in reality he never manages to realize them. For example, her goal of being fully accepted is ... middle of paper ... and she sees it as an escape, and by giving away things that have no value to her, she is communicating to him that she "acts and does things accordingly." Like Jay Gatsby, many elements of the paragraph that opens the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God play into Janie Crawford and the way she fits into the gender roles described by Zora Neal Hurston and, in a sense, twists them. , in the narrative of his novel and in the cited paragraphs. With these two different characters in two different stories, the narrator of the paragraph conveys a message and draws the distinctions between men, women and how they achieve their dreams and the differences between them in doing so. Works Cited Fitzgerald, F Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed Matthew Brocolli. New York: Scribner 2004Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: Reprint Edition 2013