Objective Correlative and Foreshadowing in Hurston’s “John Redding Goes to Sea”

    “Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the simple folk there in the Florida woods for he was an imaginative child and fond of day-dreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grow numerous palms, luxuriant magnolias and bay trees with a dense undergrowth of ferns, cat-tails and rope-grass. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. The little brown boy loved to wander down to the water’s edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and John Redding wanted to follow them.”

    — “John Redding Goes to Sea” by Zora Neale Hurston

    Technique

    In “John Redding Goes to Sea,” Zora Neale Hurston turns to the objective correlative and symbolic foreshadowing techniques to set up her entire short story in one paragraph.

    The above excerpt juxtaposes John’s desire to sail away with nature’s elements floating in the St. John River, creating a symbolic image that threads the story. In the fourth sentence, Hurston writes:

    On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths.

    The two key words in the sentence are “bosom” and “float” because they set up a smooth transition to the subsequent sentence that spotlights the protagonist’s inner life:

    The little brown boy loved to wander down to the water’s edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and John Redding wanted to follow them.

    Hurston points out John’s love (“loved”) for the water, which associates with the heart (“bosom”), and the hyacinths floating (“float”), which John wants to be (“John Redding wanted to follow them”). John’s imagination symbolizes his desire to see the world and foreshadows later scenes in the story.

    Use

    • Create foreshadowing with concrete hints that allude to the climax and open possibilities in the reader’s mind as to how the story could end.
    • Set up parallel symbolism between the outer world and the character’s inner life with recurring images, connecting between the two and building a cohesive world. This technique can also be used to create transitions as Hurston did.