It’s hard not to compare Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to Walden; harder still not to compare the voice of the book’s narrator to Thoreau: ever-observant, curious, at times droning, and always alone. The aloneness of the narrator is part of what makes Pilgrim such a singular book, but it also creates a challenge for the reader. It is difficult to connect with a narrator who is entirely alone and whose mind rarely interacts with anyone else’s except to relate this anecdote or that. In some ways, the natural world operates as another character to some success, and is a foil to the narrator’s aloneness.
But for the most part, the success of Pilgrim wavers where the narrator lives in this sort of solipsism. We come to know her (if, indeed, the narrator is a woman—we don’t get any clues as to this particular slice of her humanity) primarily through her interaction with the natural world:
What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind (139).
There is no doubt that Dillard has a masterful grip of the English language. She can turn a phrase beautifully; her syntax is something to behold. It is important to note this because I suspect that part of Dillard is at the core of the traits she shares with the narrator of Pilgrim. But without really knowing the narrator, I had a hard time receiving whatever wisdom she was dispensing. The narrator rarely offers anything of herself, and the result is a book of beautiful observations about God and nature and the disorderliness of life about which I care very little because I do not know much about the narrator.
The reader can appreciate that the narrator aims “to keep myself open” to the meanings of all the created order that exist in the valley. The narrator is exceedingly self-aware, and the book would be an entire failure without that trait. But she is so cerebral in her pursuit of true sight that the narrator’s pilgrimage never veers from her own mind. That limits what she is able to accomplish with the book because, ironically, she constricts her own sight.
She does reveal herself in some ways—earlier on page 34, for example, she realizes that “I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad.” Later in the book, she says “Boo!” to a grasshopper. This is charming, and the insight helps the reader to feel a sense of connection. The narrator tells the reader about how she interacts with plants and creeks and books and foxes, but I can’t recall a single instance of the narrator actually interacting with another human being. This may arise out of the narrator’s desire to understand the world without interference or mediation, to see by noticing only what is actually there rather than to see the represented simulacrum of things.
Yet even in the sentences above, where the narrator uses the first person, we still learn very little about her, or what we learn is not sufficient to create even a sketch of a whole person. Where Rachel Cusk included loads of extraneous detail in Aftermath, Dillard includes almost no revealing personal information. Where Thomas Lynch followed a thought from inception to conclusion in the pages of The Undertaking, Dillard introduces thoughts but barely connects them back to the way they might interact with the world in which we live, the world of people and streets as well as foxes and giant water beetles. That aloneness of the narrator and her unwillingness to take what she has learned outside of Tinker Creek makes me less likely to trust or want to read more of her, because she seems to exist primarily in her own mind, never testing or exchanging her ideas against others.