Annie Dillard Summary

Words: 360
Pages: 2

Annie Dillard looks to the sky, a moment in time where everything seems wrong. Colors drained from the scene she stood in, and her written reaction went on to tell the reader that the sudden eclipse struck her in awe. The imagery and metaphors in her essay reveal just how bewildered she was. Dillard first describes her surprise in paragraph two when she describes the sun as “going”, and that the world was wrong. She compares the beginning of the eclipse to an old photograph, told in paragraph 3 as it states, “The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded.” She uses this metaphor to describe how different the land looked from the regular everyday life. The event that took place startled her, and to express