Chapter 8 "The Village"

In Chapter 8, Thoreau gives account of the instances when he visited the village, and he takes a rather curious view of them. He studies the people like he studies the animals and nature in Walden. He says "As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys." You can clearly see he views humans and animals as the same, just specimens to be observed and watched from a distance. His tone is completely detatched from the village; it is as if he feels closer to nature than to the society which raised him. He views the village as simply another life form to study. At one point, he states "The village appeared to me a great news room;" Even the community as a whole was just a communications network for him to observe. His diction, especially in the part when describing "the gauntlet" is focused on primal instincts, like "appetite, fancy (desire), digestion." He uses such animalistic words; it just furthers Thoreau's view that the village that it is merely a community for him to study. His purpose in writing this is to prove to himself that he is above everyone else. He observes them just as he does animals, he even says "In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip." The way he states things is as if he is trying to convince himself that he is above the rest of society, that in his own perfect transendental world, he is the exception to the masses. He uses his experience of being jailed for unpaid taxes to further his reasoning. He states "But, wherever a man 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." He uses this experience as a reason to say he is above the rest of the village, and that he can observe them like creatures for his amusement. He tries to use this "heroic deed" to justify his haughtiness towards the rest of society. To him, someone has to do something unheard of, and for a good cause, to be worthy of his equality. He uses his endeavours to show the audience that he is above them all. But if someone can do what Thoreau does, be their own man, and care not for what society thinks, then maybe Thoreau's tone towards that one person will change.