The Individual — Centrality and Independence
As the story of Thoreau's own spiritual journey, Walden elevates the individual in a personal way. The experience of the author himself is central to the book. Thoreau emphasizes the first-person nature of his narrative in "Economy": "In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted. . . . We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well." He requires not only of himself but of every writer "a simple and sincere account of his own life." His life validates the narrator's work and confers the right to advise others. Thoreau emphasizes the fact that he proclaims his own experience through the image of himself as Chanticleer, the fabled rooster, in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For": ". . . I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."
In Walden, as throughout Thoreau's writings, anything that encourages individual conformity to the status quo — society, institutions, the historical past — is criticized. In "Economy," Thoreau compares primitive and civilized life: "[T]his points to an important distinction between the civilized man and the savage . . . the life of a civilized people [is made] an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed." Thoreau stresses how costly this assimilation is. Institutions — church, the marketplace, government, the political arena — impose their own values and curtail the individual's freedom to think independently. The village is full of shops that beckon to the passerby, but their materialistic appeal distracts a man from the pursuit of nature and spirit. In "The Bean-Field," the noisy members of the military training band (ironically described as keepers of "the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland") blur into an indistinct, humming swarm. In "Economy," the train — regarded by most as progress — transports the products of trade and commerce, metaphorically running over most of those who rush to board it. When Thoreau describes his July 1846 arrest in the village for refusing to pay his poll tax, his freedom to protest slavery and the Mexican War is compromised by government as personified in the jailer (Sam Staples, unnamed in Walden). Government infringes upon the "virtues of a superior man." Wherever the individual goes, "men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society." The thinking man is necessarily opposed to the social structure. In Walden, Thoreau exalts the change required for individual spiritualization. Society and its institutions are conservative, inertial forces, obstacles to transformation.
