An American childhood by Annie dillard - Essay Example

An American Childhood: Meaning and Style Full Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood is a short story that paints the colorful childhood memories of the author about her family and neighborhood as she vividly recalls them. It presented her world from a child’s point of view where an adult reader would be amazed at just how one child would be as full of wisdom and insight as Annie. Her story portrays a variety of lessons about family living, of chasing dreams and fatherhood, gentleness and motherhood, racism, respect and discipline.

She spoke about the importance of choosing family over one’s dreams through her mention of her father who painfully decided to give up his personal dreams to protect his family from the dangers of what would come from the talk of the people. Her adoration of the man with principles he stood for may not have been directly pointed out but they were clearly expressed as the writer saw through the eyes of a child. She spoke about her mother in a childlike manner, telling the story just how it happened, without sugar-coating rather in a child’s innocence; she placed her mother in the rightful pedestal.

The story is a craftily written piece of art which engages the readers, making alive the actions, people and places mentioned. Probably the greatest ingredient used in the story that really grips the readers to stick their noses on the book until the end, is the honesty and innocence of the child in the grown-up Annie. Along with this, she made alive the story with her wit as she used professional means of story telling like figures of speech. Alliteration was used, with the repetition of sounds as the story is told, to put emphasis on some parts of the story, drawing attention from the reader for one to meditate more on it or analyze the meaning of which.

An example for this is the line, “There was no messiness in her, no roughness for things to cling to, only a charming and charmed innocence that seemed then to protect her, an innocence I needed but couldn’t muster”. She used metaphors as well bringing life to some things she mentioned in the story as she viewed them during her childhood. She made the icebox motor talk in the line; “You are living”, the icebox motor said. In an interesting manner, her childhood imaginations were drawn before the eyes of her readers and this simply made the story more enjoyable.

Even the figurative languages the author used in her story showed the genius in her as she realized as a child the essence of the stories he read or heard to the facts she observed. Metaphorically, the child Annie thought, “Skin is earth; it was soil.” And she continues to observe, “I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt”, a sentence that shows perhaps another vital element of how she tells the story, amusement.

An American Childhood is not just a story about a famous author’s childhood rather a story with several stories in it, touching different angles in our lives, affecting the reader’s mind and eventually influencing an individual’s thoughts and actions.