FratFiles

• Save Paper

Character List
There are no major characters in Walden other than Thoreau, who is both the narrator and the main human subject of his narrative. The following list identifies figures who appear in the work, as well as historical figures to whom Thoreau refers.
Henry David Thoreau -
Amateur naturalist, essayist, lover of solitude, and poet. Thoreau was a student and protégé of the great American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson , and his construction of a hut on Emerson's land at Walden Pond is a fitting symbol of the intellectual debt that Thoreau owed to Emerson. Strongly influenced by Transcendentalism, Thoreau believed in the perfectibility of mankind through education, self-exploration, and spiritual awareness. This view dominates almost all of Thoreau's writing, even the most mundane and trivial, so that even woodchucks and ants take on allegorical meaning. A former teacher, Thoreau's didactic impulse transforms a work that begins as economic reflection and......

View the rest of this paper...

Approximate Word Count: 1170
Approximate Pages: 5 (250 words per double-spaced page)

Similar Essays

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson
   

   Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson Properly Acknowledged by Ralph Waldo Emerson certainly took his place in the history of American Literature . He lived in a time when

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson
   

   Ralph Waldo Emerson Have someone ever written something so well; that it has influenced the lives of future poets? Well, Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of these many poets who have

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson
   

   Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson "...was truly one of our great geniuses" even though he may have a short biography (Hodgins 212). But as Emerson once said himself, "Great

4. Ralph Waldo
   

   Ralph Waldo Introduction Ralph Waldo Emerson "…was truly one of our great geniuses" even though he may have a short biography (Hodgins 212). But as Emerson once said himself,

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson
   

   Ralph Waldo Emerson Introduction Ralph Waldo Emerson "...was truly one of our great geniuses" even though he may have a short biography (Hodgins 212). But as Emerson once said