One aspect of the essay that I've always enjoyed is the versatility of the form. Within the essay packet that we're using this semester, one can find several different types of essays - some that read like short stories ("Red: An Invocation", "Mint Snowball") or monologues ("Sunday"), while others ("Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird") have the feeling of a scholarly research paper. These, in and of themselves, are only a sampling of the various elements that span the form. Other types of essays include political manifestos, literary criticisms, and different examples of argumentative writing. An essay may take the form of prose or verse; it is flexible in many respects.
"Red: An Invocation" involves a series of recollections situated around a disparate allusion to Donner Pass, the infamous route through the northern Sierra Nevada mountains which is named after a party of 81 Californian-bound emigrates who, according to some reports, resorted to cannibalism after they were stranded by a snow storm for some months. This is, at times, a playful piece - the narrator is constantly correcting their own choice of vocabulary as they meditate on the cyclic nature of life and death via a scene involving a fox and a hawk.
In "Sunday" the narrator uses the context of food to examine race relations in the United States. The essay itself gives the impression of a monologue; the language is somewhat colloquial and the the lack of indentation or quotation marks when dialogue is used add to this effect. It is a beautifully written piece with lots of sensory details (the descriptions of the food are especially visceral) and descriptive passages that lead amazing to an incredibly poignant and powerful conclusion.
The title of "Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird" gives the impression that the piece will be, in some part, didactic. It is, in fact, not, but it is an informative piece, full of information pertaining to hummingbirds. Diane Ackerman writes of their history and various behaviors before exploring an anecdote concerning the novelist Jeanne Mackin. Ackerman goes on to explain some of the relationships between hummingbirds and vanilla bean cultivation, and attempts to perhaps explore larger ideas of the relationships between various entities that co-exist in nature.
While these essays may present information in different ways, each is similar in that it is trying to present information that is intended to make the reader contemplate their relationship to the world around them.
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