Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Dillard begins and ends Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with the story of her former cat, who sounds like kind of a jerk. Here's the beginning:
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws […] And some mornings I'd wake […] to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses. (1.1)
And here's the end:
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who sprang through the open window by my bed and pummeled my chest, barely sheathing his claws. I've been bloodied and mauled, wrung, dazzled, drawn. I taste salt on my lips in the early morning; I surprise my eyes in the mirror and they are ashes, or fiery sprouts, and I gape appalled, or full of breath. (15.28)
Sure, she could shut the window, but that wouldn't be very literary, would it? And symbolically-speaking, it also wouldn't give us the opportunity to examine how a year at the creek changes the narrator.
In the beginning, Dillard is decidedly more romantic about waking up covered in bloody paw prints. After first relating the story, she says, "What blood was this, and what roses? […] The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew" (1.2). Romance aside, notice how everything is either/or—emblem or stain, keys or mark of Cain.
By the end, Dillard knows it's both. She no longer has an either/or, but instead a both/and. To be a creature on the Earth is to be beaten to within an inch of your life—to live is to be scarred. And yet, in the midst of this scarring, Dillard is "full of breath." Her year at Tinker Creek has taught her that the reward for your scars is a glimpse of God.
There's an innocence in the first cat story, and there's wisdom and resignation in the second. Dillard no longer looks in the mirror upon waking and sees the bloom of roses—now she sees the ashes, sees life rising from them. You can only be made to bleed so many times before you stop romanticizing blood, and as the book ends, Dillard sees blood for all that it is: life and death.