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Chapter 4
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Beauty and Horror
Divinity and Mystery
The Power of Books
Looking vs. Seeing
Humanity’s Relationship with Nature
Summary
Analysis
Out in the late February woods, Dillard finds a curled and dusty snakeskin sitting, incongruously, next to an abandoned aquarium. The skin appears to be knotted in the middle. When Dillard tries to untie it, she realizes that a bit of the skin twisted and dried in such a way that it gives the impression of a knot.
The broken aquarium is a metaphorical reminder of the mediated way in which most people interact with nature—at a distance, or in small, domesticated slices. The fact that it’s broken hints at Dillard’s belief that nature is much more powerful than humanity can comprehend or control. The knot of the snake’s skin thus represents her attempts to puzzle meaning out of the world and, increasingly, to answer the question of divine mercy and justice.
Active
Themes
Dillard wonders how long it took early humans to realize that the seasons changed in an orderly progression, and how we learned to count that time. She notes that even in the 20th century, marking the passage of the seasons is so vitally important that we drill it into schoolchildren from a young age. Maybe people do this, Dillard muses, because it’s less orderly than it seems. It’s almost impossible to catch the moment when one season shifts into another. Some trees stay green year-round, while others wither and fall in the summer. Sometimes frosts come early, and sometimes they come late. Time is a loop, or perhaps a spiral, and it isn’t easy (or perhaps possible) to tell where we are on it at any given point. Similarly, “the power we seek” seems to move in a continuous loop, too, with no beginning and no ends to untie.
