Character Clues
Character Analysis
Location
Dillard defines herself by location in the title of the book: She's the pilgrim, and Tinker Creek is the place where she's, uh, pilgriming.
In the first chapter, she says, "I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia's Blue Ridge […] It's a good place to live; there's a lot to think about […] the creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home" (1.5). Okay, so Dillard is definitely down with nature.
In case we're concerned that her preference for life amongst the bugs and trees is just the byproduct of circumstance, she reminds us later that she's definitely not a city girl: "I've lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained" (6.16). In other words, Dillard's tried the city—and the city is not for her.
You couldn't do the kind of soul-searching Dillard's trying to do in the middle of Central Park. Her goal is to become one with the creek, to define herself in relationship to nature. She sets about studying the water in Chapter 1, is stalking muskrats by Chapter 11, and finishes Chapter 15 contemplating a maple leaf. There are nature girls, and then there's Annie Dillard, who kicks rocks and takes names.
Thoughts and Opinions
"I propose to keep here what Thoreau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind,'" says Annie Dillard in Chapter 1, "telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead" (1.28). Well then—looks like we'll be spending some time inside your head, Ms. Dillard.
And the thing about Dillard's head, Shmoopers, is that there's thinking, and then there's thinking. There's having an opinion, and then there's having an opinion based on having read every book in the library. Annie Dillard does the latter—consider her the original Hermione Granger, if you will. Included among the subjects on which Dillard gives her thoughts and opinions are: seeing, routine, ancient Israeli religious ceremonies, entomology, astronomy, quantum physics, visual impairment, Eskimos, mushrooms, and beef cattle. She'll settle for no less than writing a love letter to Thoreau as she attempts his "journal of the mind."
Although she doesn't want you to think of it as a book of essays, each chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an examination of and meditation on another component of nature. This is heady stuff—they don't give out Pulitzers for nothing—and Dillard isn't just a writer, she's a scholar and philosopher.