an american childhood by annie dillard analysis

When Dillard breaks into the second person, she invites the reader into her story as a participant. The first-person point of view adds a sense of immediacy to the narrative: as readers, we experience life as Dillard does. She, too, alongside the reader, looks back at her childhood through the particular events she remembers, and considers how she remembers them. This technique creates a focus on perception, particularly as a middle-aged Dillard describes the events of her childhood. The world Dillard depicts revolves around her interpretation of events and her experience of life around her.

As a child, Dillard adored both of her parents, believing them to be infallible.ĭillard recounts most of the narrative from a first-person point of view therefore, the narrative draws the reader into the story through immersion in Dillard’s consciousness. Overall, her childhood consisted of all of the resources required to raise a bright, successful, contributing member of society: loving support and structure from her intelligent and slightly eccentric parents, material resources, an excellent education, and plenty of socializing contact with others of her socioeconomic group- white, well-to-do people in Pittsburg. She admits in her memoir that she received an excellent education there, though as a teenager she chafed against the rules and restrictions of her school. Dillard’s prose, with its direct tributes to and echoes of Thoreau’s Walden and Emerson’s lyrical essays, participates in a modern usage of this unique American philosophy and imagination that flowered during the 1830s and 1840s.ĭillard attended public school through fifth grade, then attended a private school called the Ellis School.

The major contribution of Transcendentalism remains the view that divinity permeates nature and humanity, joining them together. This intellectual awakening-together with Dillard’s description of the land, its history, its rocks and stones, and its creatures-ties Dillard to the American Romantic period of American letters, particularly to Transcendentalism.

An american childhood by annie dillard analysis