The Lamppost from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The narrator in Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel by Zora Neale Hurston, is a lamppost. More specificly, the lamp atop the post. On page 145 it is stated, "Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers." and on page 44, you find out that the mayor "unwrapped it and had it wiped off carefully and put it up in a showcase for a week for everybody to see." And it didn't sit on any old post. Later on that page, "He sent men out to the swamp to cut the finest and the straighest cypress post they could find, and kept on sending back to hunt another one until they found one that pleased him." The lighting was celebrated with a barbecue and a chorus of altos.

Truthfully, the lamp doesn't even need to be half-omniscent. It was brought to the town so that the Mayor wouldn't scuffle over stumps and roots in the dark. Therefore, logically, he would put it close or next to his house. Janie was on the back porch when she was telling her story, in flashback form, where a lamp would easily be able to overhear everything said. Lamps are not strangers in being compared to gods. One example is in Narnia. It came into being as Narnia did, sung by Aslan. It marked the wardrobe-portal in the second book. And a huge number of works, including the Chronicles of Narnia, compare a light source to the sun, which has been personified by the Egyptians into Ra, the most powerful of the old gods.
-Guest Written by Gower