Meaningful Passage

“The room inside looked like the mouth of an alligator- gaped wide open to swallow something down.” Janie expresses this thought soon after Tea Cake disappears with her money and Janie is left there, feeling abandoned and not knowing what to do with herself, but what can one draw from this quote? It may seem to some as an interjection of slight humor into the story by the author just to lighten the mood a little, but this quote can mean a lot more than what it seems.
By just scratching the surface of this quote one can infer a quick meaning from it. Janie’s room resembled that of the mouth of an alligator, wide open, filled with nothingness, ready to replace the nothing with something and swallow it down. Janie, just recently running away with Tea Cake, likely did not take much with her seeing how Tea Cake was eager to provide for her, therefore, their newly moved into room, would not be fully furnished now would it? This is symbolized by the nothingness inside the gator’s mouth. This can be an accurate inference of the quote, but one can take it much further than this. Alligator’s are known for their many teeth, used to clamp down on; hurt their prey. It is likely that whatever was in Janie’s room at the time, as empty as it might have been, could have been sources of pain for her. Now Janie was in the state of mind that Tea Cake had ran off with all that she had owned, and she was feeling pretty awful at the time. Anything and everything located within the room at the time of all of this occurring could have reminded her of Tea Cake, the source of her pain, like a person being attacked by an alligator. The teeth of that alligator that bite into the flesh serve as a constant reminder of the current source of pain.
What about when the alligator actually swallows its prey down? What would it be like, assuming one were able to be alive in an alligator’s stomach? It would likely be cold, dark, and lonely. This is where Janie ended up in her realization of what she thought was really happening to her. First comes the pain of the teeth; where one now knows that one is in trouble and there may be nothing one can do; where one feels helpless. And then comes the cold, dark, loneliness of the innards of the alligator; the place where one ends up; the place where one sits and is miserable of the current situation. When something such as this happens, one ends up sad and upset, wondering what is next; like being in a cold dark room. Janie, now believing that she was abandoned and deceived by Tea Cake was now here, in this awful place.