Hurston tells Janie's story in the form of a frame — that is, the author begins the novel and ends the novel with the same two people in the same setting, with only an hour or two having elapsed. Sitting on the steps of her back porch, Janie tells her story to her friend Pheoby Watson. The telling takes only part of an evening; Pheoby arrives at Janie's house in the early evening, and it is dark when she leaves to go home. Within this comfortable setting of one friend talking to another, Hurston tells Janie's story. This frame becomes the first part of the structure of the novel. The rest of the story proceeds chronologically, but it is not a first-person narrative. The author quickly takes over the telling and uses third-person point of view. The reader follows the experiences as Janie lived them, but it is the novelist who controls the story.
Within the frame, the novel has four units. First, Janie's early years with her grandmother. Second, an interlude where Nanny tells her own story and the reader learns about Janie's loss of childhood and the brief months of her first marriage. Janie's years with Joe Starks fill a third section, with the episode of the mule as an interlude that has no function in the story other than to show Janie's compassion for an ill-treated animal and an act of kindness that Joe did for his wife. Of course, it also gave Hurston an opportunity to poke fun at local customs, especially funerals. And the final section focuses on Janie's marriage to Tea Cake Woods. One interlude in the final section focuses on Mrs. Turner, and it serves to contrast Janie's open-mindedness with Mrs. Turner's bigotry. The frame is finally complete when Janie comes full circle and rests her tired feet on her own steps and spends the evening with Pheoby.
