The Deer at Providencia - Annie Dillard

The Deer at Providencia is a short story by Annie Dillard which deals primarily with our response to suffering.

The story goes as follows. The author along with 3 of her friends from North America, are on vacation in the Amazon jungle, eating lunch with a tribe. While they are eating, the narrator notices a wounded deer tied to a pole. Upon asking the villagers about it, she discovers that it was caught in the morning and will probably be prepared for the evening meal. After the meal, she overhears some of the other tourists talking about her and her apparent lack of sympathy for the wounded creature. They are certain that if any of their wives were in her stead, they would have cried or at least attempted to help the deer. From this point, the story takes an abrupt turn.

The author immediately, with a switchover of barely a line or two, begins to talk about a man she had read about in the newspaper who had been burned severely for the second time. She describes the torment and agony that such victims must go through day after day and the high suicide rates of burn survivors. The story concludes with her giving a pitying glance and a kind word to the deer, followed by the line, “I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say.”

The primary theme throughout the piece is that of the mystery of suffering, of pain and sorrow, and of its universality. People from all walks of life must endure it, money has no weight in its hands.

The vivid contrast between a bunch of well off people pitying an injured deer and a hideously burned man in pain and with no reason to live on, provides rooting for the aforementioned concept of sorrow’s universality. The tone in which the first half is written is quite descriptive and realistic, on a relatively upbeat note. The second part of the story is written with vivid details of the man suffering, and by doing so, renders the seemingly insignificant suffering of the deer obsolete.

The only thing in common between these two almost entirely clashing themes is the concept of suffering and our inability to do anything about it. The narrator couldn’t help the deer with her kind words at the end, and neither could she help the burn victim with a consoling letter. The implied conclusion is to accept that suffering is present in the world, but also accept the fact that the vast majority of the time, there is little to nothing that we can do about it.