Annie Dillard Long Fiction Analysis
Annie Dillard’s writing is difficult to classify. Indeed, readers often gain a far greater knowledge of subjects such as history, theology, natural science, and ethnography from reading her works, fiction as well as nonfiction. The influence of Dillard’s masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek pervades her fiction, and the inseparability of nature and humanity is a central premise in Dillard’s oeuvre. One of the central characters in The Living, Clare Fishburn, simply could not exist without Washington’s Bellingham Bay. The landscape, the place itself, defines him. Similarly, Lou Maytree, one of the primary characters in The Maytrees, would lose depth and definition entirely without Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.
The Living
James Joyce’s 1907 short-story masterpiece “The Dead” comes to mind when reading Dillard’s The Living, which was first written as a short story. In Joyce’s story, no one actually dies, but the characters are Dublin’s “walking dead.” In The Living, many of the unforgettable characters face horrific deaths from disease, drowning, and natural disaster, but they lived full lives. They had lived with the vital life force inherent in the early American settlers who forged west into Whatcom’s gigantic forest on Bellingham Bay in Washington State.
Spanning the second half of the nineteenth century, Dillard’s elegant novel is made up of five sections. It begins with the story of as-strong-as-steel pioneers Ada and Rooney Fishburn, who travel over mountain passes and deserts to the Pacific Northwest. On the way, they lose a child, and soon after their arrival, Ada loses Rooney, who dies while digging a well. They are followed by the next wave of settlers, Minta and Eustace Honer, who decide to shun their stifling wealthy lives of leisure in Baltimore and buy farming land in Washington State. Similarly, Eustace will die young, caught in a logjam. Minta’s house burns down with her babies inside and she, in turn, adopts three Native American children and turns her land into a profitable hops ranch. The new family lives among the gentle Lummi and Nansook Indians, who befriend them, nurture them, and eventually marry them.
The next generation of families consists of Clare Fishburn, who enjoys life to the fullest, and June Randell, Minta’s wealthy sister from the East who comes west to visit and decides to stay. They provide for their families in periods of great economic growth, but also when the banks fail and they lose everything except their cows.
The Living is also a celebration of the natural world, which includes human nature. To illustrate, Dillard shows that, in the realm of nature, humans are vulnerable, given that their skeletons are inside their bodies; insects, by contrast, are less vulnerable because they have an outside armor to protect them. Humans live a short time on Earth; they die easily and, not unlike insects and other animals, can die violently and unexpectedly. Near the end of the novel, the gentle yet bearlike Clare Fishburn, who joyously plays a fiddle and lives each moment absolutely to the fullest, calls out a great “no” against Beal Obenchain, the dark stalking figure who represents impending death. Clare nevertheless jumps off a train trestle. As he falls through the air he sees a farmer plowing, and he comes to realize that humans, too, are plowed into Earth by nature to make way for new generations of humans. Clare also realizes that his life on Earth was a blessing.
The novel abounds with wondrous anecdotes of human behavior that make up living: the man who plants sunflowers in Alaska, only to have their “heads” twist off when the Sun fails to set;...
(This entire section contains 1149 words.)
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the family who washes their clothes by dangling them from a boat they row; the ominous man, Obenchain, who lives in the stump of a giant cedar tree; and the Lummi mother, who dashes a cup of cold water into her baby’s face to quiet the child.
In The Living, Dillard goes far beyond giving her readers a good story. Indeed, each character encounters and resolves a metaphysical dilemma in the search for his or her own meaning of life, and this, in turn, prompts readers to examine their own lives.
The Maytrees
Although much slimmer than the pioneer epic The Living, The Maytrees is a comparable family saga about three generations of the Maytree family. After the poet Toby Maytree returns from World War II, he falls passionately in love with tall and silent Lou Bigelow, also an intellectual. They marry and live happily together in a beach house in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Their happiness is complete with the birth of their son Pete. Lou adores her husband and Toby adores his wife. Toby then falls in love with a vagabond beach woman named Deary, a friend of Lou, and leaves his family to live with her on an island in Maine the morning after Pete, the son he will not see for twenty years, is hospitalized with a broken leg.
After fourteen years of marriage, the aging Toby realizes that he was not in love with Lou in the first place and that he was only flattered by how much she loved him. In Deary, he thinks, he has found his true life mate. With her, he works as a carpenter on the island and finds peace.
Unlike her mother before her, who also had to cope with a philandering husband, Lou tries but fails to hold herself together. Eventually, however, after her son leaves home to become a fisherman, she appreciates her solitude, in which life holds “no schedule but whim” and where she does not have to please anyone but herself.
Twenty years later, Toby and Deary have changed from “roughing it” on the Maine island to becoming socially and professionally successful. Deary, who was poor before meeting Toby, is now an architect in Camden, and the couple is wealthy. In time, Toby reconciles with his fisherman son Pete, who marries and has a son of his own, whom he adores. Deary’s health begins to fail, and she is diagnosed with congestive heart failure. While attempting to carry her, Toby breaks both of his arms in a fall and becomes helpless. In time, they realize they have no one to help them. Friends and relatives scatter. Toby shows up one particularly dark night on the beach to face the woman he left years ago to beg her help in caring for Deary. Lou takes her friend Deary and her wandering husband into her home and nurses them until Deary dies of heart failure.
Within a brilliant literary network of nature in the form of seascape, Dillard forces her readers to embrace the metaphysical construct that time heals all wounds. All the characters experience betrayal and intense psychic suffering, inflicted by the ones they love, yet they remain, despite years apart, lovingly attached through time.