Total Eclipse

Total Eclipse by Annie Dillard is a great example of creative nonfiction. She is allusive, descriptive, speaking to the reader, and you feel as though what she is telling you absolutely happened regardless if it actually did. This was by far my favorite short story that we have read this semester. The language and adjectives she used made it very interesting to read and helped to keep the reader engaged. I really like the sentence on page 91, “I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong.” For some reason the way she described the world and everything that she was seeing in it as “wrong” struck me. Maybe it stood out because she uses such descriptive words throughout her entire essay, that the simplicity of the word “wrong” felt non-simplistic. Regardless, I found it fascinating. She goes on to describe why everything around looks “wrong”, such as the platinum grasses.

Another line from her essay that really just stood out to me was in the second paragraph down from the top on page 90. She starts this description off by saying matter-of-factly, “What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know.” She ends by saying, “What you see if much more convincing than any wild-eyed theory you may know.” It was not so much the descriptive part in the middle of the paragraph that stood out to me; but these two lines. I feel them to be extremely true and believable in this case. I cannot begin to comprehend what she saw, and I can say this because of how in-depth her descriptions are. Even though I have read all of her descriptions, and over 20 pages of detail of how this eclipse looked, her words could never compare to actually seeing what the people who were there that day did. On page 95 she says, “The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience.” This sentence says it all; to believe it, you have to actually see it.

She also uses a lot of metaphors throughout her essay, which really allows the reader to connect to what she is describing and seeing. On page 93 she says, “At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover.” I think that the way she describes things is very unique in that she is doing it for the reader’s benefit; to put them where she was at. I have always found metaphors to be annoying, and allusive. But the way that she uses them, and maybe the simple fact that she is describing an eclipse, really makes me relate to the metaphors. Throughout the entire essay, she is very in-depth, and it almost seems like she is all over the place, but always brings it back around to relate. I really enjoyed reading this essay.

The story out of the creative writing packet that I found to be the straightest forward is Sunday by Henry Gates Jr. The first sentence in this story really caught my attention, “White people couldn’t cook; everybody knew that.” This immediately made me realize that this was from the era of the Civil rights movement. The tone and assertiveness in the sentence shows that there are hard feelings between races at the time this story is taking place in. I also found the first paragraph to be very intriguing in the sense that they were puzzled that the civil rights movement was focusing on integrating restaurants. To me, this shows how much our government knew and cared about integration and the feelings of African Americans at the time. I can hear and feel the disgust in this paragraph. The rest of the story goes on to describe cooking and a typical Sunday meal at the Coleman’s house. It’s described as a very happy and relaxing time. They eat from the time church is out on Sunday, all through the day, and into the night. I felt like the author really nailed the ending, and brought it all back together by saying, “White people just can’t cook good, Aunt Marguerite used to say; that’s why they need to hire us.”

The other story that really stood out to me, but I found less straight forward is Red: an Invocation by: Lia Purpura. Through-out the story, she went back and forth describing a Fox, and a hawk. This story definitely has an underlying meaning, but I have no idea what it is. I notice that she uses other words to describe red through-out the story, but says that they are not good enough to describe what she is seeing. The lines that really stood out to me were at the very end, “By red I mean the last thing I could see as the hawk disappeared. As the fox slipped away. And yes, I led my child into that day.” The last part about her child really threw me off. But I just can’t seem to pin point the underlying meaning of it.