Pilgrim

Throughout Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the author uses a number of techniques and devices to create images of particular landscapes that are both vivid and unique. Dillard’s language in descriptions of the landscape suggests space and shape, assigns color and likeness, and at times, implies motion and vitality. One particularly striking example of…

Annie Dillard opens Pilgrim at Tinker Creek mysteriously, hinting at an unnamed presence. She toys with the longstanding epic images of battlefields and oracles, injecting an air of holiness and awe into the otherwise ordinary. In language more poetic than prosaic, she sings the beautiful into the mundane. She deifies common and trivial findings. She…