Cathedral By John Dillard Analysis

Understanding:

1. The most important analogy in Dillard’s essay is her students. Dillard compares her students to moths; moths are attracted to the light as her students are attracted to greatness of being a great writer.

2. In paragraph 10 when Dillard says, “I’ll do it in the evening, after skiing, or on the way home from the bank…” she is referring to her students putting off writing when in her mind writing is a full time job.

3. Dillard seem to thinks the writer does her (or his) work cost sacrifices by stop doing things they love and focus on their writing careers.

4. Dillard enters the realm of religious iconography by using the monks who wore a “saffron-yellow” robe reminiscent of the Buddhism monks in orange-yellow robes who set themselves

The spider’s web is in a corner connected to the tile wall to wile wall and floor, in such a usual spot and it was miraculous that it kept her alive. The miracle she celebrates through out the essay is the death of the moth you once helped killed as the spider killed the sixteen moths who lay behind her toilet.

6. Dillard refers to the corpses of the moths beneath the spider web in her bathroom for the 16 years she had quit writing as if it was the death of her writing as the moths died to the spider.

7. The glimpse of life and what will be gone when you die. The beauty of what people misses while they are caught up in their childish ways.

8. The significance of the book Dillard is reading, when the moth burns is when Rimbaud “burnt out his brain”—yet what remains in a “a thousand poems.” Also shows when the Monks lit themselves on

Dillard is explaining that she has two hands just as a broad axe to hit it head on.

5. The effect of Dillard calling the moth a “she” instead of “it” shows that it’s a person who she deeply regrets killing off. Since Dillard killed off the moth she finished her earthy work on a writing scale.

6. The effectiveness of the specific details in paragraph three are extremely effective towards this article, since it shows Dillard past ways by showing it through the description through the sow bugs, earwigs, spider skins, and two moth bodies.

7. By explaining in great detail about the flame and how the moth burned for two hours which gives the impression that day time shall never come. Dillard gets across to us the sudden flare of the moth as it first hits the flame, as if a “flame-faced virgin gone to god” as if it was a beautiful sight to see the moth burst up in flames.

8. The parts of Dillard’s narrative that is set in the present when she is in the woods reading James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire, a novel by Rimbaud surrounded by inspiration. Dillard is located physically in the present time is in her classroom with her