Haven’t we all come to a particularly stressful and overwhelming point in our lives and thought to ourselves, “I wish I could live a life with no regrets or decisions to be made?” Annie Dillard wrote about just that idea in her essay “Living Like Weasels.” Annie Dillard is an American author from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who is known to write about nature in an attitude similar to Naturalists of the 1880s to 1930s literary era; she is also compared to several Modernist writers such as Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway. Dillard published an essay called “Living Like Weasels” in 1982 in which she contemplated the idea of humans living instinctively as animals do, as a result of an accidental run in with a wild weasel. This essay contains several …show more content…
The symbol most apparent in “Living Like Weasels” is, in fact, the weasel that Dillard comes in contact with. For instance, the anecdote within the essays states that “Once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won” (Dillard). In this story, the eagle symbolizes life and all of its unexpected events that it throws at us and the weasel represents how people should react to life. The eagle tries to get the best of the weasel, but the weasel does not allow the predator to knock him down. He instead takes up for himself and goes after it. This is considered to be the way people should respond to life, by getting back up when life knocks them down. This use of symbolism illustrates the theme of conformity/rebellion by showing how the weasel took a stand against the normal way of life and the food chain by fighting back against the predator rather than lying down and accepting its fate as prey. It is said later on that this is what the author wishes to do, to live like the weasel and be “open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will” (Dillard). Thus, the symbolism in “Living Like Weasels” involving both the eagle and the weasel helps articulate the theme of conformity/rebellion within the