Stunt Pilot by Aniie Dillard

606 Words3 Pages
In Annie Dillard’s, Stunt Pilot, the exemplifying degenerative factors of life are not only minimized but overcome by the metaphorical idealization of freedom. To begin, the reader can infer quite early on in the essay that the Spring season has just begun with this quote from page 181, “The sky did not darken until ten o’clock or so, and it never got very dark. Your life parted and opened in the sunlight. You tossed your dark winter routines, thought up mad projects, and improvised everything from hour to hour.” Dillard uses this shift of season early on in the essay to give way to an overtone of new comings, fresh beginnings, liveliness, new found hope and, even more importantly, the essay’s main focus, Dave Rahm. Repeatedly throughout the essay Rahm’s intriguing, almost divine, personal attributes are brought to light. These attributes, along with the change in season, help to support the idea that Rahm is indeed symbolically and metaphorically relatable to the embodiment of freedom. Next, many times during the essay the movement of Rahm’s airplane is mentioned. Most often referred to as “the line”, the airplane’s movements take on a body of their own as Dillard repeatedly relates the airplane’s line to different forms of art, music and literature. Dillard exclaims, “Rahm’s line unrolled in time. Like music, it split the bulging rim of the future along its seam. It pried out the present.” (182) Dillard’s use of this quote pays reverence to the symbolic nature of the airplane’s line and also, through this specific quote, helps give the reader an overall metaphor that shows that, if in fact Rahm is a metaphor for freedom, “the line” is a metaphor for the product of freedom which is an unparalleled, unrivaled depth of beauty. Lastly, In the beginning of the essay, before Rahm performs at the airshow, we are introduced to one of his planes.
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