Terwilliger Bunts One by Annie Dillard
“Terwilliger Bunts One” by Annie Dillard is an amusing, revealing essay in which the speaker, a woman in her twenties or thirties, tells the audience stories about her mother and her mother’s unusual personality. The ultimate purpose of the essay is to show by the mother’s various quirks and rules how her daughter is inspired to be her own person, stand up for the underdog, and to keep people on their toes, and to hopefully pass this lesson on to the audience. The speaker has written this essay in descriptive, comprehensive terms which convey to the audience how special and remarkable her mother was, and to share some of her teachings with the rest of the world.
“Terwilliger bunts one” is a phrase that the speaker’s mother picks up from a radio announcer talking about a baseball game. The speaker uses her mother’s reaction to this unusual-sounding phrase, using it to test pens and whispering it in her daughters’ ears in the middle of a prank, as a springboard for the rest of her essay. It displays in miniature the most memorable things about her mother’s personality; she is spontaneous, mischievous, a word lover, and a person who deviates from normalcy on a regular basis. There is no apparent thesis, as the author begins her essay immediately without an introduction and lets the story flow through stories and examples. Though the reader is not immediately given a reason as to why they are listening to the story of this woman’s mother, the language and sheer energy and life in the main character compels them to continue to read.
The tone of this essay is generally a positive one, written informally and almost conversationally. The speaker obviously takes pleasure in describing her ex...
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...r lose the attention of the reader. In the conclusion, the speaker ends more definitively than she began, telling the audience the most valuable lesson she was taught by her mother, “that if our [the speaker and her sisters] classmates came to cruelty…we were expected to take, and would be each separately capable of taking, a stand” (p. 79) By doing this, the speaker causes the audience to look back on the rest of the story to learn the mother’s lessons, and it becomes clear that everything the speaker was taught, confidence in herself, fearlessness in the face of adversity, a respect and love for the abnormal, and a sense of protection for the needy have contributed to the lesson the speaker refers to.
Bibliography:
1. Dillard, Annie. “Terwilliger Bunts One.” The Norton Reader. Ed. Linda H.
Peterson. New York: Norton & Company, 2000. 74-79.
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