Leaving Walden

Abstract

Claims Thoreau’s movement between Walden Pond and Concord is not a contradiction but a deliberate strategy: by pretending to be a stranger to his native place, Thoreau is able to offer a critical portrait of Concord that highlights its comic absurdities, which he treats as symptomatic of American culture as a whole. Suggests his understanding of the unnatural folkways of his old friends and neighbors has features in common with contemporary ideas about the social construction of reality. For him, nature provides a yardstick for measuring the credulity and prejudice of his peers, allowing him to adopt an ironic perspective on natural history and to highlight the surreal character of much of Americans’ daily life. Argues he subjects these traces to a form of scrutiny that might be called “natural deconstruction,” questioning the preoccupations and presumptions of his culture in order to call attention to the inadequacy of its worldview.