My first thought on Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse” was that it seemed too abstract and poetic for my simple mind. It wasn’t until the IV of the essay that I kind of get what the purpose of Dillard’s essay was. She wrote, “We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.”
We as humans tend to surround ourselves with a certain routine, where things are very normal and known. Because we tend to like security and predictability, not instability or surprises. In my opinion, Dillard’s total eclipse is a metaphor for the unknown, something unpredictable that affects and influences her mentally and physically in a totally unpredictable way. Thus it’s the unknown that caused the total eclipses, not the daily round or any type of normality.
In this short story, I think Dillard wants to help her readers be able to see the senses behind her words, not by explaining things in details, but narrating her story in a way that force her audience to rely on their own experiences and feelings to understand and interpret the true meaning behind. Though at times, I feel that the structure of the story was a bit vague and the vocabulary could get confusing, for instance, when Dillard gives a lot details about the drunk men in the lobby, which I find irrelevant to the story’s line. However, I think Dillard did a good job inspiring and relating to her audience to get out of their comfort zone and find their own something abnormal and magical, something that has always been around them but they never care to observe, something like a total eclipse. I find the way Dillard draws the attention of the audience to details of the story and build up their own interpretations is very evocative and brilliant, something that I can take away onto developing my stories.