Her father took his boat down the Allegheny River to New Orleans, which had been on his bucket list ever since he read about boat trips in a book. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.Īnnie's father left his family for a little while when she was a child, but none of them felt abandoned, because it was a family decision for him to go.

Without this conscious awakening, Dillard indicates, no life can be complete.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Her narrative becomes a call to action: the reader is invited to awaken intellectually and to perform this duty to the self, to grow and to live a fully developed life. She acknowledges the reader as joining with her in the process of constant, vigilant awareness that is the most significant motif in the autobiography. When Dillard breaks into the second person, she invites the reader into her story as a participant. The first-person point of view adds a sense of immediacy to the narrative: as readers, we experience life as Dillard does.

She, too, alongside the reader, looks back at her childhood through the particular events she remembers, and considers how she remembers them. This technique creates a focus on perception, particularly as a middle-aged Dillard describes the events of her childhood. The world Dillard depicts revolves around her interpretation of events and her experience of life around her. As a child, Dillard adored both of her parents, believing them to be infallible.ĭillard recounts most of the narrative from a first-person point of view therefore, the narrative draws the reader into the story through immersion in Dillard’s consciousness. Overall, her childhood consisted of all of the resources required to raise a bright, successful, contributing member of society: loving support and structure from her intelligent and slightly eccentric parents, material resources, an excellent education, and plenty of socializing contact with others of her socioeconomic group- white, well-to-do people in Pittsburg. She admits in her memoir that she received an excellent education there, though as a teenager she chafed against the rules and restrictions of her school. Dillard’s prose, with its direct tributes to and echoes of Thoreau’s Walden and Emerson’s lyrical essays, participates in a modern usage of this unique American philosophy and imagination that flowered during the 1830s and 1840s.ĭillard attended public school through fifth grade, then attended a private school called the Ellis School. The major contribution of Transcendentalism remains the view that divinity permeates nature and humanity, joining them together. This intellectual awakening-together with Dillard’s description of the land, its history, its rocks and stones, and its creatures-ties Dillard to the American Romantic period of American letters, particularly to Transcendentalism.

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard