Eclipse By Dillard

Instead of being about the solar eclipse described in the first paragraph, “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, is about the eclipses in our everyday lives. Although she does go into detail about the eclipse, she spends more time discussing small details. Dillard spends more of the essay focused on minute details throughout the time leading up to the eclipse than the actual eclipse itself. The title “Total Eclipse”, is not talking about the solar eclipse; instead it addresses the eclipses in her life, such as the clown painting, the hotel lobby, the gold mines, and her time in the diner.
Dillard opens the essay talking about her travel to Yakima for a paragraph and then uses a page to describe the clown painting in her hotel room. She says,
Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. During those
The first lady that Dillard sees in the lobby is an “absolutely motionless . . . platinum-blond woman in her forties wearing a black silk dress and a strand of pearls” (Dillard 478). The relevance of this women is questionable because after this sentence she is forgotten. Dillard spends more time talking about the, “Six old bald men” (Dillard 478). These men are sitting in the television room of the lobby either sleeping or watching the television. According to Dillard, all of them were clearly alcoholics and it seemed like they live in those seats. (Dillard 478) Dillard revisits the story of the old men she observed in the hotel towards the end of her essay, but never the women she originally describes. As she and her husband are leaving the hotel, they see the same six old men sitting in their chairs watching the same television. This can be like people in everyday life, there are some that stick out but then are quickly forgotten, and there are some that are bland but never seem to leave. The men and the women seem to have impacted Dillard because of the detail she uses to describe