Friday, December 11, 2015

Blog Assignment #2 Eng 274-Total Eclipse

My Piece of "Total Eclipse"



Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse", is a first person account on the unnaturally natural phenomena known as a total eclipse. As she details her experience, Dillard comes out of the other side of this celestial event changed and effected in a deep and personal way. Through brilliant imagery and simple, but effective word choice, Dillard creates an atmosphere of unnaturalness and organised confusion. She makes you feel as if when she was on that mountain with the other stargazers, the happening of the total eclipse signified the world making a mistake. The first example of this was when Dillard stated " I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong". The brilliance in those lines didn't shine through in the use a elegant wordplay or astrological jargon. What made these lines jump out to me was the blunt,  no nonsense way in which she described the total eclipse. Nothing fancy was used because nothing fancy was needed. She described her experience as if she was writing for that exact moment, with no time for reflection. what came to her mind at that moment in time simply was that "the world was wrong". 

No comments:

Post a Comment