Annie Dillard\'s \"The Giant Water

Annie Dillard's "The Giant Water Bug"

Annie Dillard's essay on "The Giant Water Bug" begins as an example of nonfiction, meditative nature writing and ends with a murder. Dillard's text moves from a contemplative and humorous meditation on the nature of the relationship of human beings to nature to a highly dramatic scene of the cruel, Darwinian dog-eat-dog (or bug-eat-frog) biological, amoral survival that takes place regularly in the natural world. Her beginning is conversational, even folksy in tone. She sets the scene of the author strolling by the water, as she is on an expedition "mainly to scare frogs." She uses literary terms such as "inelegance" to describe the way frogs take off from their legs, but quickly moves to the whimsical in her word choice, as she anthropomorphizes frogs, imagining how one frog is "emitting a froggy "Yike!'" when surprised (Rather than using a more conventional onomatopoeic word like 'ribbet').

To convey a sense of meandering in her thoughts and her walking path while she watches the frog, Dillard uses long sentences, and often repeats words, particularly adjectives as in the following phrase: "Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still," and "I got better and better at seeing frogs." She constantly goes from the mundane then suddenly talks about flying frogs, creating a fantastic image in the reader's mind. She also suddenly moves from a sentence full of long clauses to a sentence with short, simple words to convey the elemental nature of what she sees.

Then, she moves from the general nature of her wanderings, to a specific day, when once at the end of the island she noticed a small green frog, that looked, not like a flying creature, but a "schematic diagram of an amphibian" This injection of biological language suggests a sharp change in narrative tone, and a reminder of the scientific aspects of nature, and natural survival. It is also a reminder of Dillard's intelligence and human perspective, as well as the fact that she is not a child, even though she regards her frog with childish wonderful.

Dillard keels "on the island's winter-killed grass" setting the scene in the early spring, after the cruelty of winter -- and a foreshadowing of the cruel scene to come. The frog is not just frightened it is: "lost, dumbstruck" with "wide, dull eyes. The wet nature of the frog is evocatively described as he is said to slowly crumple and sag. The verb choice of sag is unusual, but conveys the unusual texture of the frog's skin as well as his sorrowful physical posture, as does the way his "skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent."

The frog's fear is rendered into physical action. This gives 'respect' to the frog, as Dillard does not describe the frog's feelings, which she cannot really know, as she just is observing the creature. Her metaphors are clearly in the language of a human being and the vocabulary reference of a human being. A frog would not describe himself like "a deflating football" or "a pricked balloon."

Dillard, still not sure of what is happening: "watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall." Ruck and rumple uses alliteration to create a sense of hard, consonant violence. The frog's fear and its physical effect upon the frog affect the interior life of the observer. Her similes begin to take on an ugliness, as the frog's skin "lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water," evoking both filth and the frog's natural environment. Nature is ugly as well as beautiful, charming, and pacific, and soon Dillard: "gaped, bewildered, appalled" at what she saw.