Out Of The Dust Theme

The short story “The Chase,” an excerpt from An American Childhood by Annie Dillard, and the novel Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse share a similar theme of how strangers impact a person's life. The theme that they share is how strangers can have a positive, long-lasting impact on people’s lives. Dillard and Hesse use evidence throughout the text to support the theme. At the beginning of the text, Annie uses flashback as a method to explain how the boys taught her to play football and baseball. She writes, “Some boys taught me to play football. This was fine sport” (Para 1). “Boys welcomed me at baseball, too, for I had, through enthusiastic practice, what was weirdly known as a boy’s arm” (Para 2). Dillard is suggesting that the boys taught her and let her play with them. The boys invited her to throw snowballs and she has “seldom been happier since” (Para 2).

As the excerpt progresses, Dillard uses the man running out of the car to show that this was “the only time in all of life... a man got out of it, running” (Para 9). Annie describes how the man was the only person in all life that got out of the car and chased them. Annie thought that the man would have given up if he was an ordinary adult. “At the corner,

“The neighbor women came/They wrapped my baby brother in a blanket /and placed him in Ma's bandaged arms/We buried them together/on the rise Ma loved,” Also, the neighbors cleaned the death from the house, then they blamed Billie Jo. “The women talked as they/scrubbed death from our house/I/stayed in my room/silent on the iron bed/listening to their voices./"Billie Jo threw the pail,"/they said./ "An accident/"they said./Under their words a finger pointed./They didn't talk/about my father leaving kerosene by the stove./They didn't say a word about my father/drinking himself/into a stupor/while Ma writhed, begging for