Want to learn the ideas in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard here.

Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.

Video Summaries of Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Annie Dillard.

1-Page Summary of Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Overall Summary

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a book about nature and spirituality. It’s written by Annie Dillard, who describes her observations of nature around her home in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

The book is divided into four sections, one for each season of the year. The first and last chapters are an introduction and a conclusion, respectively. Dillard divides the novel into two sections to represent two ways we can know God: via positiva(which affirms that we can know God through positive affirmations of his greatness) and via negativa (which affirms that God is unknowable).

The book begins with the narrator waking up on a January morning. She decides to go for a walk while remembering an incident where she saw a water bug kill a frog by poisoning it and deflating it. The narrator then states that her purpose is to record the weather around her for one year, in an attempt to better understand God.

The second chapter of the book has a lot to do with seeing. The narrator walks around in nature looking for certain animals, trying to learn how to look at things differently from her normal way of doing so. She thinks about how people who have cataract operations might see the world differently after their surgery and wonders if she can change her own way of seeing things.

In the third chapter, the narrator thinks about winter and how animals interact with each other. She reads about ways in which humans have hunted animals during this season and also reads about hibernation.

In the fourth chapter, she tells a story about how insects act in ways that harm them. They repeat behaviors without thinking of consequences. The narrator hopes that she will never be trapped in such a cycle; however, it is difficult to avoid being stuck in loops like time and spirits or things like snakeskin knots. In the fifth chapter, there’s an image of a snake skin with no beginning or end. This reminds her of other endless loops—like the passage of time and spirits haunting places—that are hard to escape from once they have begun.

The sixth chapter is about the ability to live in the present. The narrator realizes that a beagle puppy is living in the moment because it lacks self-consciousness, which allows people to think about what they’re doing and why they are doing it. This causes us to worry and feel frustrated when we can’t do something perfectly or as well as we’d like.

The narrator returns to the creek in spring. She spends time there, thinking about birdsong, Eskimos and pond life. In the last of these reflections she wonders why a creator would have put so much effort into creating something that is ultimately unimportant.

In the ninth chapter, a flood happens and the narrator starts thinking about her neighbors who live lower in the valley. In the tenth, she thinks of all of nature as being cruel and sinister. She considers whether nature has any morals at all or if morality is just something that humans have projected onto it.

The author sees a muskrat for the first time in her life. She then goes on to stalk it and becomes obsessed with it. The next day, she stays at a cabin near where she saw the muskrat and sleeps outside because of how amazed she is by nature.

In the thirteenth chapter, the narrator sees a mosquito suck on a snake’s blood and thinks about parasites. She realizes that most of the insects she has seen have been scarred or maimed in some way, which leads her to believe that wholeness is an exception to the rule. In spite of all this death and violence, it’s still good to be alive and part of nature.

The narrator of the fourteenth chapter of  The Winter’s Tale  has a desire to move north, as birds do when winter comes. However, she realizes that she would have died if she tried to go on her own and that what she needs will come to her.