Return with the Elixir

Zachary Bailey
Post 3
March 21st
The Hero Journey

Return with the Elixir

The Return with the Elixir actually occurs at the beginning and the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, however, chronologically, the whole scene is at the end where it should be (We learn after getting a little ways into the story). This final step of the hero journey is embodied by Janie's return to Eatonville, after being gone for over two years. Having returned, she is back in the "ordinary world" after having been away with Tea Cake in the "Special world". Janie returns because Tea Cake dies during the Resurrection in the story and, ironically, Janie was the one who had to kill him.

Upon her return, we see the "sickness" of the town that the "elixir" will cure. Once noticed by the other towns people "she made them remember the envy they had stored up from other time" (page 2) and we see what bitterness and envy has done to them "so they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tool out of laughs. It was mass cruelty" (page 2).

The "elixir" is simply Janie's story, her doings for the time she was gone. Only this elixir, the truth, can cure the townspeople of the animosity that they have built up over Janie's years in and out of the town. Janie finally locates her old friend Pheoby, and they both sit down, one to speak and one to listen, and Janie begins to tell her story. The book now leave "the return with the elixir" and jumps back in time to the "ordinary world", which takes place at the chronological beginning of the story. After all the other steps of the hero Journey are gone through, and one reaches the end of the book, the story returns to the elixir and the Journey and "cure" are completed.