The subject of furniture provides the narrator with yet another opportunity to depict how he shed his old way of life for the sake of the new. Furniture, to the narrator, is like a "spider's web" which may entangle the "butterfly," Thoreau's symbol for the spiritually perfected man. Hence the narrator avoids collecting furniture — or rather, "sheds" it from his life. Alluding to the snake's sloughing-off process, he asks, "pray, for what do we move ever but to be rid of our furniture." Again making the same allusion to the snake's renewal, he praises the savages who annually go through the ritual of burning their belongings so as to start each year of their lives anew, unencumbered by property — "they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually." The narrator wishes that all men would "in like manner purify and prepare themselves" as he has done. He has cast off furniture, tradition, debts, and the worries of an ordinary, materialistic life. He has cast off his old social personality for the sake of developing a new, more perfect soul.
The preponderant number of metaphors associated with purification, rebirth, and renewal leads the reader to conclude that the "I" voice's main concern, and Walden's most important theme, deals with the possibility of transcending one's old life and being reborn into a spiritually elevated one.
