CarrollMarching To the Beat of a Different DrummerTerwilliger Bunts One by Annie Dillard is an amusing, revealing essay in which the speaker, a woman in her twenties or thirties, tells the audience stories about her mother and her mothers unusual personality. The ultimate purpose of the essay is to show by the mothers various quirks and rules how her daughter is inspired to be her own person, stand up for the underdog, and to keep people on their toes, and to hopefully pass this lesson on to the audience. The speaker has written this essay in descriptive, comprehensive terms which convey to the audience how special and remarkable her mother was, and to share some of her teachings with the rest of the world.Terwilliger bunts one is a phrase that the speakers mother picks up from a radio announcer talking about a baseball game. The speaker uses her mothers reaction to this unusual-sounding phrase, using it to test pens and whispering it in her daughters ears in the middle of a prank, as a springboard for the rest of her essay. It displays in miniature the most memorable things about her mothers personality; she is spontaneous, mischievous, a word lover, and a person who deviates from normalcy on a regular basis. There is no apparent thesis, as the author begins her essay immediately without an introduction and lets the story flow through stories and examples. Though the reader is not immediately given a reason as to why they are listening to the story of this womans mother, the language and sheer energy and life in the main character compels them to continue to read. The tone of this essay is generally a positive one, written informally and almost conversationally. The speaker obviously takes pleasure in describing her exceptional mother and is proud of the lessons her mother taught her, referring to her energy and intelligence (p. 77), her restless mental vigor (p. 78), and her willingness to stand up for her opinions, no matter how u...
