In Annie Dillard’s essay, Living Like Weasels, Dillard uses stylistic writing to make her story more universally understandable, starting from her initial encounter the with a weasel and the life lesson she took out of the encounter. The essay gives its readers an unusual comparison between the life of human beings and the life of weasels. There is also a physical description of how Ernest Thompson shot an eagle and found the skull of a weasel clinging to its throat which was a perfect symbol of how the weasel died protecting one necessity. Mrs. Dillard’s intention to write this essay is to show how particular weasel-like attributes can truly be adopted to help people live better lives. That is why this essay connects with the American Dream
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The sentence, “He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window,” this highlights the narrators encounter and interaction with the weasel by personifying and believing that the eyes are the window to the soul, with the phrase applying to humans, not wild animals. The interaction with the weasel did not just mean looking at each other as she narrates the underlying meaning that they clearly understood each other. When the weasel runs from her and they break their eye contact and connection between herself and the weasel, she is left blaming herself for been unable to disassociate herself from the world’s problems. She says, “I blinked. I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel’s brain and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation.” (Dillard). This sums up human problems to focus on things around them, therefore humans are not justified to be in the company of intelligent simple creatures like weasels.
By the end of the essay, her tone indicates her absolute awe of the weasel’s existence. “A weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.” (Dillard). This shift in tones is useful because her opening tone matches the tone of her readers, whereas her conclusive tone resembles what her readers’ tone needs to
The sentence, “He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window,” this highlights the narrators encounter and interaction with the weasel by personifying and believing that the eyes are the window to the soul, with the phrase applying to humans, not wild animals. The interaction with the weasel did not just mean looking at each other as she narrates the underlying meaning that they clearly understood each other. When the weasel runs from her and they break their eye contact and connection between herself and the weasel, she is left blaming herself for been unable to disassociate herself from the world’s problems. She says, “I blinked. I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel’s brain and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation.” (Dillard). This sums up human problems to focus on things around them, therefore humans are not justified to be in the company of intelligent simple creatures like weasels.
By the end of the essay, her tone indicates her absolute awe of the weasel’s existence. “A weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.” (Dillard). This shift in tones is useful because her opening tone matches the tone of her readers, whereas her conclusive tone resembles what her readers’ tone needs to