Close Reading
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I had read once about a mysterious event of the night that is never far from my
mind. Edwin Way Teale described an occurrence so absurd that it vaults out of the
world of strange facts and into that startling realm where power and beauty hold
sovereign sway.
The sentence in Teale is simple: ‘On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea
sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will
carry them to salt water.’ These are adult eels, silver eels, and this descent that slid
down my mind is the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago. As oneinch elvers they wriggled and heaved their way from the salt sea up the coastal rivers
of America and Europe, upstream always into ‘the quiet upper reaches of rivers and
brooks, in lakes and ponds – sometimes as high as 8,000 feet above sea level.’ There
they had lived without breeding ‘for at least eight years.’ In the late summer of the
year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished. They
turned silver; now they are heading to the sea. Down streams to rivers, down rivers
to the sea, south in the North Atlantic where they meet and pass billions of
northbound elvers, they are returning to the Sargasso Sea, where, in floating
sargassum weed in the deepest waters of the Atlantic, they will mate, release their
eggs, and die. This, the whole story of eels at which I have only just hinted, is
extravagant in the extreme, and food for another kind of thought, a thought about the
meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures. But it was feeling with which I
was concerned under the walnut tree by the side of the Lucas cottage and dam. My
mind was on that meadow.
Imagine a chilly night and a meadow; balls of dew droop from the curved blades
of grass. All right: the grass at the edge of the meadow begins to tremble and sway.
Here come the eels. The largest are five feet long. All are silver. They stream into
the meadow, sift between grasses and clover, veer from your path. There are too
many to count. All you see is a silver slither, like twisted ropes of water falling
roughly, a one-way milling and mingling over the meadow and slide to the creek.
Silver eels in the night; a barely-made-out seething as far as you can squint, a
squirming, jostling torrent of silver eels in the grass. If I saw that sight, would I live?
If I stumbled across it, would I ever set foot from my door again? Or would I be
seized to join that compelling rush, would I cease eating, and pale, and abandon all
to start walking?
Dillard, Annie. The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 1974, pp. 219-220
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Close Reading
The following passage comes from a chapter called “Nightwatch” in Annie Dillard’s The
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
Close Reading
The following passage comes from a chapter called “Nightwatch” in Annie Dillard’s The
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
188
Close Reading
Peeling Back the Layers – “Nightwatch”
Grade Ten
2. Before reading the passage, highlight every other sentence.
3. Read along as the teacher reads “Nightwatch” aloud.
4. Read along a second time, this time marking anything you particularly like, notice, or
wonder about.
5. Summarize the story of the passage: the who, when, where, what.
6. Determine the points of view and discuss how they affect the meaning.
7. Determine the verb tense Dillard uses and discuss its effect on the meaning.
8. Write in your journal any personal experience(s) that this passage reminds you of.
9. Bracket concrete details in the passage
10. Discuss the importance of these details (orally or in writing).
11. Circle Dillard’s diction choices, those places where she could have selected different words
(denotation) and that suggest strong associations (connotation).
12. List these words, and provide dictionary definitions for them and the associations
they suggest.
13. Underline the images in the passage.
14. List them, and label which sense or senses each appeals to. (What words produce memories
or pictures of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, motion? Many are combinations.)
15. Discuss the effect of these images.
16. On a clean copy of the passage, highlight the figures of speech.
17. List the figures of speech, label them, and note the effect of each figure of speech, how each
extends and deepens the telling of the eels’ behavior.
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Close Reading
1. Predict the contents of the passage based upon the title.
18. Number each of the 24 sentences, and label Dillard’s sentence types and their effects.
Close Reading
19. Label each sentence as simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex and determine
whether it is a loose, periodic, or balanced sentence. Analyze the effects the variations have
on meaning.
20. Label syntax techniques and analyze their effects.
21. Underline Dillard’s use of alliteration.
22. List the examples and explain the effect of each.
23. Label the various tones.
24. Compose several possible themes.
25. List titles of other literary works you have studied that this passage reminds you of or that
have similar themes, and explain why.
26. Evaluate the passage: Do you like it or dislike it? Why? Give specific details from the
passage to support your answers.
27. Write an analysis of the passage that incorporates a theme, discusses how elements
(a certain number of them) in the passage contribute to the meaning, and concludes by
pulling everything together and reinforcing the connection between the method and the
meaning of the passage.
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