Overview Of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

The word “pilgrim” defined states that it is a person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons. In the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard, the creek is the author’s home, her sacred place, and she represents the pilgrim. Throughout the book she journals the individual discoveries she makes about creation and nature fills the chapters like the four seasons fill a year. A theme of seeing and questioning God’s love for creation is repetitive throughout Dillard’s writing; with the help of allegories and symbolism enhances the theme. Programmed like a robot children are prone to ask questions about the creation around them; similarly Dillard replicates the astonishment of a child with a symbol of pennies. As a child

Again finding symbolism within an object she conveys the theme with the narration of the Tom Cat at the very beginning of the book and at the very end of the book. She describes how the cat would jump through the window at night and onto her chest, and “some mornings I would find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses” (Dillard 1). When she wakes she questions where the blood came from, and acts with an innocence of the circumstances surrounding her; she looks in the mirror examining the circumstances; however, Dillard only recognizes the evils as the “mark of Cain” (Dillard 2). Conversely, at the end of the book she uses the symbol of the tom cat again except this time she looks without tunnel vision. This time when she looks in the mirror she does not see the roses the marks left but “ashes, or fiery sprouts, and I gape appalled, or full of breath;” she sees life rising from them (Dillard 270). The expressive symbolism created through the cat gives her year at Tinker Creek purpose, because now she is taught that the incentive for her wounds is a glimpse of