Julia Griffin

Lia Greenwell
Introduction to Creative Writing
02/24/16
An Unnatural Natural Phenomenon:
Paradox, Distortion, and Dissonance in Total Eclipse
In her essay Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard uses distorted, nonsensical, and impossible images
to describe the experience of witnessing a solar eclipse. Rather than describing the eclipse itself,
she focuses on the surreal and terrifying experience, using metaphor after metaphor, attempting
to understand her emotional reaction to the event. Dillard describes the eclipse using paradoxical,
impossible, and illogical comparisons to recreate the surreality she experienced in her own mind
for the reader.
This distortion can be seen when Dillard writes,
The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills grasses were
finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a
movie

filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing

in a

movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages.

This quote shows the incredible dissonance between reality and Dillards experience. Her
descriptions of grass as finespun metal, and her hands as silver transform the organic to the
inorganic, showing how unnatural the eclipse feels. Additionally, her use of the metaphor a
movie filmed in the middle ages elucidates the unreality of time in her mind, and signals the
beginning of distorted time within the piece.

Another example of surreal and impossible imagery is Dillards description of the moment
wherein the moon completely covers the sun. She writes, At once this disk of sky slid over the
sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed.
Her choice to say sky rather than moon is a poignant one, departing from basic scientific
knowledge to show the failure of logic in this moment. The objects she describesa lid and a
lens capare relatively commonplace, but are extremely out of place when used to describe an
astronomical phenomenon, further demonstrating the dissonance between the logical and
emotional experience of the eclipse. The hatch in the brain does not exist, but it demonstrates
the end of logical thought, and in the context of the piece, is believable.
Dillard writes, Oh, and then the orchard trees withered, the ground froze, the glaciers slid
down the valleys and overlapped the towns. If there had ever been any people on earth, nobody
knew it. This description projects an ice age onto the modern landscape, demonstrating the
perception of the eclipse as outside of time and natural laws. The image starts small with a stand
of trees and moves into the destruction of humanity, in a description reminiscent of a time-lapsed
scientific projection. The sentence If there had ever been people on earth, nobody knew it, is
itself a paradox: there must be people for nobody to know or not know, and she herself must
exist to write it. The paradox embedded within that language further demonstrates the feeling of
impossibility that runs throughout the eclipse scenes in the piece.
In the context of the essay as a whole, distorted and impossible images create a feeling of
disorientation and encourage readers to suspend their disbelief: the description of Dillards
experiences bares little connection to the scientific comprehension with which readers are likely

familiar. They illustrate an internal experience rather than a two minute phenomenon, replacing
an external narrative arc. The piece would be neither interesting nor aesthetically enjoyable
without this cognitive progression and change: the mundanity of objective and distant scientific
description is avoided by Dillards distorted descriptions of her surprising emotional reaction.
The dissonance between the official narrative and the personal experience is recreated on a micro
level in the diction of the piece.