Walden | Style
First-Person Narration
Thoreau wrote Walden in the first person. He explains on the first page that, although ‘‘I’’ is omitted from most books, ‘‘it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.’’ In addition, he explains that the book is all about Thoreau himself. ‘‘I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well,’’ he assures readers.
Because of its first-person narration, and because it is based on journals, readers often assume that Walden was written ‘‘off the cuff’’...
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