So This Was Adolescence Analysis

Purpose: Adolescence is a facet of all lives, though many want to forget about it. However, Dillard has the will to express hers in “So This Was Adolescence,” portraying how her impulsiveness and strong emotions led to volatility and controlled her actions. Throughout her adolescence, Dillard repeatedly did certain actions as she whipped her bed daily, laughed often, reread certain books, played “Poet and Peasant Overture” repeatedly, tried to faint often, etc. (143-144). When she was whipping her bed, she described herself “like a creature demented” to show how she felt that she wasn’t in control of herself because her attempts at controlling her emotions led her to actually whipping her bed, though she later described it as futile

When she was playing her music, she had always played “Poet and Peasant Overture,” boogie woogie, or “something else, anything else,” showing how she randomly jumped from one piece of music to another, without considering why she did so, showing how erratic she was (144). However, there is a common theme found in all of these actions, as she did them multiple times and often. She did these actions in an attempt to find constancy in her life that her emotions didn’t provide. Dillard also used a motif, water, to help convey how emotionally troubled she was. For instance, she explained that her feelings were like waves as they “arose from nowhere” and that they “battered at me or engulfed me” (143). By comparing her emotions to waves, she stresses how she couldn’t control what she felt and how that tormented her. She continues the reference when she says she was trying to get rid of her wildness

Later, she emphasizes how the music she played was loud and raucous (144). She does this to convey that her emotions were intense and led the audience to believe that she was unstable because she described her music as “maniacal”, “crashing”, and “piercing” (144). Dillard even made herself bleed when playing one of her pieces, and also played another with her fists, showing how her emotions caused her to perform extreme actions (144). She also describes her multiple phases of feelings when she was bored: “I was first hungry, then nauseated, then furious and weak” (144). The parallelism highlights how her feelings were always changing and suggests that she was never in a comfortable state with herself, likely caused by her extreme emotional states. Dillard even describes herself as a “live wire”, a wire that’s considered dangerous because it contains electricity that provides power to other objects (144). Though she is considered as powerful and dangerous by others, she was actually rendering herself into a powerless position as she shot out sparks “that were digging a pit … and [she] was sinking into that pit” (144). This is irony adds to how convoluted she becomes because of her emotional extremes and shows how society wasn’t helping her situation; rather, it was only