"A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek"

Paper Summary:

Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, is set in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. This paper examines chapter 3 which is entitled "Winter." Despite the chilling cold Annie Dillard must face in the mountains. It looks at how the chapter not only focuses on Dillard's struggle to survive the elements and the wilderness with few resources. It also discusses how chapter 3 also includes the author's perceptions of the local animal populations struggle to cope without the help of civilization's comforts and how she uses both literary metaphors and also facts about the animal world, gleaned from scientific as well as literary study.

From the Paper:

"Dillard notes that her attempts to survive alone, indoors, means she must "bloom" like a "forced forsythia," or like a delicate, fragrant, and hot house grown flower in all of its glory. Because she is exposed to warmth and sun artificially, against the nature of the climate, she is full of energy indoors, yet the outdoors strikes her carefully tended constitution as unduly harsh. This metaphor suggests that the winter is not keeping with the author's natural inkling for outdoors and warmth. (40) But still Dillard bears up. Thus, Dillard, by this metaphor, suggests she is a summer or spring person by nature who prefers to be free and unencumbered, but there is a incongruity between her inner nature, and the outer, winter nature of the harsh mountains."

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