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

aflame in 1963 Saigon to protest their treatment by the Diem regime. The sacrificed their lives, but by doing in a dramatic way, by self-immolation, they brought the worlds attention to plight.
5.

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

fire.
Strategies and Structure:
1. I first realized that Dillard’s essay draws an extended analogy between the writer and the moth when she started talking about her students. When reading all of the different literature no great piece of literature is just about a spider and a moth.
2. Dillard’s main analogy help to explain the kind of beauty the writer seeks by keeping an open eye and look at the world around them and catch glimpses of little things. Their dedication to his or her writing is showed on how much thought and how much they see the beauty of life.
3. Dillard’s main analogy convey her own sense of awe and wonder at the sacredness of the writer’s calling because she molded them into her creation and their dedication will show when they all become famous writers.
4.

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

students.
9. Dillard achieves a welcome comic relief in paragraph 11 by changing to candles swiftly giving it a more serious tone. Dillard starts talking about when she has visitors she has three candles lit and she never blows the candles out when her visitors leave.
Words and Figures of Speech:
1. The effect of Dillard’s including “like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral domes” is to show how strong moth wings (chitin) are.
2. Transfiguration- the change in the appearance of Christ that took place before three disciples. This applies to Dillard’s essay since she takes the moths and shows how her student who was impeccable as she can be, a burning light and she blew her out before she became someone. Dillard changed before her new students arrived and she doesn’t blow them out she keeps them burning bright.
3. Dillard uses such technical terms as thorax, cerci, and chitin to truly explain the complexity of her article.
4. The effect of the word “scant traffic” is effect by showing how the spider’s web is barely adequate and yet the spider lives. The word raving is effected since her students thought her talk was irrational and was just mumbo-jumbo.
5. Dillard capitalizes Moth in paragraph 4 because she has experience with a specific moth.
6. Dictionary
• Lineage- Descent from an ancestor; ancestry or pedigree
• Bulbous- Fat, round, or bulging
• Dorsal- relating to the upper side or back of an animal, plant, or organ.
• Thorax- Chest
• Translucent- Allowing light, but not detailed images, to pass through; semitransparent.
• Chitin- A fibrous substance consisting of polysaccharides and forming the major constituent in the exoskeleton of arthropods and the cell walls of fungi.
• Buttresses- A Provide (a building or structure) with projecting supports built against its walls.
• Gilded- Covered thinly with gold leaf or gold paint
• Replenished- Fill (something) up again
• Essence- The intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character.
• Immolating- kill or offer as a sacrifice, especially by burning.