In Annie Dillard’s non-fiction narrative essay Total Eclipse, which was taken from the collection called Teaching a Stone to Talk, she gives a detailed description about her experience of witnessing a total eclipse phenomenon with her then-husband Gary and also some thoughts about humanity that she gained from the experience. Unlike many other non-fiction writers, Dillard likes to bring fictional elements to her writing which adds on to the unconventional themes and ideas that she incorporates in her essays. In “Total Eclipse” she purposely deviates from the conventional ways of writing nonfiction by using literary devices such as metaphysical conceit, allusions to scientific phenomena, and personal symbolism to emphasize the insignificance of humanity compared to the vastness and powerfulness of the universe and its natural phenomena.
Throughout the essay, Dillard uses metaphysical conceit to compare two distinct objects as a way to emphasize how
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In the beginning of the essay, Dillard uses simile and compares the arrival to their destination as “like the death of someone”, she also describes the feeling as “sliding into the region of dread”, ”slipping into fever” or “falling down the hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering”. Here, she compares her feelings to “death”, “dread”, “fever” and “falling down a hole”, which are not some conventional things that a writer would compare to the feelings one feels in waiting to the witness of a total eclipse. By making these bizarre comparisons, the author has successfully emphasized her anticipation for the total eclipse, which further highlights the magnificence of the cosmic phenomenon of a total eclipse. Also by comparing her feelings to common sensations or experiences that people would understand, Dillard shows the readers how just a single natural event can bring such a great impact to humans, which again emphasize the universe’s vastness as oppose to the silliness and insignificant of