Close Reading
The main summary of the story “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston is about a woman named Delia Jones and her husband, Sykes. Sykes, knowing her fear of rattlesnakes, plays a horrible joke on her when he comes into the house that night as she is doing her job washing clothes for white people. Sykes hates this and berates her about it. In the course of their argument about this, Sykes calls her a hypocrite for washing “white folks” clothes and it is also revealed that he is cheating on her with a woman named Bertha. Delia strikes Sykes with an iron skillet from the stove as he was about to hit her just as he had done so many times before. He leaves the house, leaving Delia alone in her bed, after finishing her laundry, to ponder the brokenness of the foundation of their marriage. In the wee hours of the night and in the early hours of the morning, Delia hears the cry of her abusive husband and the sound of a rattlesnake. When she looks to see what is going on, Sykes’ neck is swollen and one of his eyes looking at her hoping that she will come to him. The sun is starting to come up. All of a sudden, she realizes what had happened and that it is too late for him to get any help. The theme of this story is a mixture of an old cliché and a new thought, but it is fitting to what has happened in the story from the beginning to the ending:
Do unto others as you would like done unto you. Be careful how you treat the fears of other people because those very same fears may destroy you one day. There are many different elements that Zora Neale Hurston uses in order to orchestrate this point in the story. One of the things that she uses is the power of organization and the structure of the story. She starts with the most immediate part of the story. Delia is washing the clothes in the house at night after church on Sunday when her husband comes in and they go through an entire altercation. Throughout the process of the argument-turned-fight that they are having, there are some facts revealed about Sykes and his rocky marital to Delia. After he leaves Delia goes up to bed and Hurston reveals their past. Zora Neale Hurston uses the beginning of the story to give the reader a hint of who Sykes really is, but the middle of the story confirms it. Therefore, the end is foreshadowed and then confirmed when it is reached. Zora Neale Hurston uses some type of “sandwich” approach with her writing of this short story. The beginning shows the present, the middle of the story shows the past, and then the end of the story shows the present once again. Another method that Zora Neale Hurston uses to show the theme and the main point of the story is the point of view. The story is being told from the point of view of third person omniscient. It would not have worked very well with the theme if Sykes or even if Delia had told the story. Each of them have their own bias to bring the story would not have been told innocently from either of them. It works better by the fact the Zora Neale Hurston told the story as an all-knowing character. She brought the facts and nothing but the facts. There was nothing to cloud her judgement since she was the third party who did not know either Delia or Sykes Jones intimately. She was just a regular person telling the story for the benefit of the reader. This why the theme and the main point works so well with the point of view that the story is told from. Overall, the story consists of three characters. However, in speech and dialogue, the story consists of only two characters. It’s hard to say how many characters there really are. I could also include the rattlesnake since it was an integral part in the story. Altogether, I believe that there were four characters because each one of them all contributed or took away from the lives of each other. There was Bertha. She was the woman that Sykes had been cheating on Delia with. In the story, Sykes mentions that he hates “skinny women.” Bertha was heavy and Delia was skinny. This could have been an early give away to the cheating that Sykes was doing. Of course, there are Delia and Sykes Jones. Delia is hard-working woman who had been putting up with an abusive marriage. She had one been soft, but the abuse made her hard and callous on the outside and a little but on the inside. Sykes is her husband who came into the marriage with lust, according to the story, and gave Delia her first beating not even a year into the marriage. Finally, there is the rattlesnake who had given Sykes his just reward. The setting and imagery shows a lot about the theme and is very descriptive. For instance, when Delia is lying in bed, the story says that she looked over the “debris on their marital path.” It gives the reader their clue that their marriage was rocky even from the start. Another place where Sykes is just about to die and yet the sun is coming up. This may signify the fact that Delia is almost free from the blood, sweat, and tears that she had put into that marriage. She would be relieved when Sykes would die. The story mostly takes place at night and night is used to signify negativity whereas sun and light is used as the opposite. However, now my question is this: What was her reaction when she realized that her husband was going to die? Was she happy, relieved, or sad? That is one of the things that Zora Neale Hurston never showed in the story.