Sample Reading Response on Image
Burroway’s Imaginative Writing Chapter 1

Annie Dillard’s “The Giant Water Bug” is about the day she observed a frog being eaten by a water bug.   On the surface, I would describe this essay as scientific.   Unless strange animal or insect happenings fascinated you, this story may not sound appealing.   But because of Dillard’s use of imagery, this piece has a resounding impact on its reader.  

Dillard begins her piece with these two sentences:

A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water; and mainly to scare frogs.   Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy “Yike!” and splashing into the water.   (15)

As a reader, we are immediately immersed in this setting AND this narrator.   The conversational “see what I could see” and the active verb “scare” tell us two things.   First, she is someone who actively looks at things for no reason other than to look at them.   Second, she is amused by nature, specifically frogs.   There is imagery in this statement also—the bank, feet, even the invisible frogs, but there is also a judgment—that the frogs’ way of jumping is inelegant.    Why does her use of a judgment here work so well? The answer comes right away: tone.   The combination of the word “inelegant” and the image of a “froggy “Yike!”” is funny.   This amusement is further emphasized through the personification of the scared frog.   It says “Yike!”  

The specificity with which Dillard describes things never falters.   We are given images of frogs being “exactly half in and half out of the water.”   We learn that the narrator “learned to recognize, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mudbank, water, grass, or frog.” (16)    In other words, the narrator is saying, in her own way, “This is the proof that I was there.”   The more exact the details, the more we believe the author.   Therefore, when she says the frog is “exactly half in and half out” the specificity adds to her credibility.  

We need this credibility for what is to follow: the unusual description of the frog being eaten by the giant water bug.   Dillard’s presents the events to the reader in the same way she experienced them.   She uses imagery to convey the same surprise she felt during her observations.    

I was impressed by the way Dillard uses metaphor and simile to convey her imagery.   She creates a kind of rhythm through her use of figurative language.  Her similes and metaphors aren’t scattered equally throughout these three paragraphs. Instead, they come most densely in the second paragraph as she describes the horrifying deflating of the frog.  She writes that, “the spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed.”  (16)  The attention to the frog’s eyes reflects a witnessed changed.   His skull is “like a kicked tent.” (16)   He is “like a deflating football.” (16)    His skin becomes “formless as a pricked balloon” (16)  and it floats like “bright scum.” (16)  This is a lot of figurative language for a few sentences! The way that she piles up so many different similes here creates an urgency to the description. The thing she is describing is so disturbing that a single simile simply won’t do.  Instead, she throws out one after another and this pile-on makes the description feel more and more frantic.  By piling on comparisons, Dillard mimics the way a person tries to make sense of something mysterious:   trying to relay a mysterious happening by comparing it to something more tangible/less mysterious like a tent or a football.

Then Dillard grounds us with a couple judgments: “it was a monstrous and terrifying thing.” These slow us down, bring the frantic pile-on of images to a halt. The slower pace continues into the next paragraph where the giant water bug is described precisely and vividly with many significant concrete details but without any figurative language. This gives us a sense of the speaker calming herself down after describing the “monstrous and terrifying” thing. Here, the description is careful, literal. Its urgency doesn’t come through a sense of speed but through a sense of wanting to describe slowly, to get the description exactly right.

At the end, when she gives us the scientific facts about this giant water bug, we can feel the same satisfaction that the narrator does when the mystery is finally dispersed and we are able to hold onto the concrete knowledge of this wondrous yet “quite common” occurrence.