Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of these structures fits this story like Cinderella’s slipper.
Plot Type : Go With Us Here
Normally, we'd assign a plot structure and talk about how the book follows it, but that's dependent upon the book having a plot. Instead, we're going to talk about transcendentalism. Who needs a plotline when you're on a divine mission?
You can't talk about Dillard without talking about Thoreau, and you can't talk about Thoreau without talking about Emerson. The latter were contemporaries (and, for two years, roommates) in the 1800s. Emerson, a philosopher and naturalist who believed in the interconnectedness of nature and the soul, urged Thoreau to start keeping a journal. The rest, as they say, is Walden.
To journal your daily observations of the natural world is to record your meditations along the path to enlightenment. Although she doesn't call herself a transendentalist, Dillard is deeply influenced by Walden, and in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she tests the theory that you can come to know God through the observation of nature. She borrows Thoreau's phrase "a meteorological journal of the mind" to describe her work in this book.
Although Dillard considers the book a continuous narrative, each chapter also works as an individual essay on a theme. She structures each piece around an animal, season, or both—there's the grasshopper story, the muskrat story, the flood story, and the oh-my-god-it's-summer-and-everything's-mating story, to name a few. Each chapter is its own search and discovery mission.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is largely a meditation on seeing, and one of Dillard's refrains is that you never know what you're going to see; you just have to let it show itself to you. Nature structures the narrative, such as it is; the author is just there to observe and contemplate.