The next dramatic shift that Dillard includes is in paragraph thirty-six, and mentions Rahm’s death. She simply writes, “Rahm smashed up in front of King Hussein, in Jordan, during a performance.” This shift is used in order to emphasize how sudden and instantaneous death is. Dillard had no warning about Rahm’s death, and neither did her audience. The shift also works to create a contrast between reality and the abstract. It creates this contrast because the audience was captivated and put into a daze by Dillard’s imagery, and they were ripped back into reality by her sudden shift. Also in the thirty-sixth paragraph, Dillard mentions how she was isolated from the rest of the world. On the “remote island…” that she and her husband were living on, they were “cut off from …show more content…
By doing this, she creates a connection to her audience, since both of them were shocked and surprised by Rahm’s death. Indeed, Dillard was taken off guard by his death, and she writes in the thirty-seventh paragraph that a “sharp looked…” filled “her eyes,” when she heard the news. After learning of his demise, she uses multiple short sentences that jolt her readers. Unlike her previous complicated sentences, Dillard writes, “He took me up once. Several years ago. I admired his flying.” She creates these short sentences in order to force the reader to stop, and to emphasize the mind-numbing effect Rahm’s death had on her. Before, Dillard used long, complicated sentences that represented the plane’s movement, and now she uses these sentences in order to convey how the plane has metaphorically stopped. Also,