How Dillard Sets the Stage

In Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse" we can see that she is writing in order to share with her audience how awestruck she was when she witnessed the total solar eclipse of February 26, 1979. This essay is particularly about sharing her experiences through the vivid use of language, metaphors and similes, and communicate with her audience how this particular event, and the journey leading up to the total solar eclipse, has affected her.

Dillard uses very descriptive language in this essay. She is able to convey powerful messages in very few words. For example we can get a strong sense of her great anticipation for total solar eclipse when she begins to describe the scenery of Yakima Valley. Dillard writes:

"East of us rose another hill like ours. Between the hills, far below, was the highway which threded south into the valley. This was the Yakima valley; I had never seen it before. I was justly famous for its beauty, like every planted valley. It extended south of the horizon, a distant dream of a valley, a Shangri-la...Distance blurred and blued the sight, so that the whole valley looked like a thickness or sediment at the bottom of the sky" (13).

From this passage we can see how Dillard uses language in order to "paint" the picture for her audience not only to see but also to experience. By using strong descriptive language in reference to witnessing Yakima valley, not to mention her other experiences while going to witness the total solar eclipse, we can see how she sets the stage for her revelations about her life changing encounter with the total solar eclipse. In fact the event was so dramatic for her that it took her two years to write her experiences down.

We can also see how Dillard foreshadows the the events prior to the total solar eclipse in order to set the stage for an experience that takes her by complete surprise. Dillard writes:

"It began with no ado. It was odd that such a well-advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have know right then and there that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbs, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welder's goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky" (14).

From this passage we can see how Dillard is communicating, however so slightly, with her audience - TO PAY ATTENTION! When she writes that she was out of her depth she is giving us a major clue that something so unexpected and so earth shattering was getting ready to happen.

Also I noticed that she uses a lot of repetition in this essay. At first it was getting just a little annoying reading the same thing over and over again restated in slightly different ways. But then I realized that she was once again communicating the importance of her experiences in order to set the stage for something bigger.

The repetition was necessary in order to produced the desired effect up her readers, also I think that it might also have been used as a subtle maneuver in order to convey her message to those audience members who couldn't get what she was up to. For those of us who did pick up on it - it only heightened our anticipation for the epiphanic moment of the text and for those who didn't pick up on it, well it probably subconsciously produced a similar effect as well.