an american childhood by annie dillard analysis

At her parents’ knees, too, she learned to deliver a punch line play straight man, “an honorable calling. “An American Childhood” also explains why the poet in her keeps getting yanked offstage and supplanted by the comedian.

“Her speech was an endlessly interesting, swerving path of old punch lines, heartfelt cris de coueur, puns new and old, dramatic true confessions, challenges, witty one-liners, wee Scotticisms, tag lines from Frank Sinatra songs, obsolete mountain nouns and moral exhortations.” Aha! the reader observes sagely, so that’s why Annie Dillard is such a language wizard: early childhood conditioning. “Adults were coming apart, but they neither noticed nor minded.”īoth of these charming people delight in language, Dillard’s mother speaking in a patois that suggests a one-woman vaudeville routine. Adults had misshapen, knuckly hands loose in their skin like bones in bags it was a wonder they could open jars.” Obvious as this is to Dillard, who hides her revulsion out of tact, the decrepitude is lost on the ancient ones. “We children had, for instance, proper hands our fluid, pliant fingers joined their skin. “Our parents and grandparents, and all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, their limp, coarse skin.

With the shrewdness of a forensic scientist, and with her sense of humor already well formed, she hits upon the most important difference between children and adults. The book begins when Dillard is 5 years old. In “An American Childhood,” she demonstrates her gift of total recall and an eye that misses nothing, records everything. Toward the end of this endearing account of growing up in Pittsburgh, Annie Dillard writes a sentence that sums up its astonishing richness of detail: “It all got noticed.” Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning naturalist, literary critic and writer of beautifully wrought prose.

An american childhood by annie dillard analysis