Henry David Thoreau's Journey To Freedom And Individualism

The Romantic Era has produced ideas and texts that contribute to the society that is seen today. Examples of these texts include Thoreau's Walden and my Learner Choice novel, Red Rising. The Romantic Era ties into Freedom & Selfhood and is important to the development of today’s society and the future ahead. It allowed people to begin to look at the world through a different lens, a lens that showed them how to embrace freedom and to find yourself. In his book, Walden, Henry David Thoreau uses imagery, simile, and metaphor, to develop his theme of self-reliance and individualism within nature. The way in which Thoreau describes the scenery allows the reader to become immersed in the world that he has described. Specifically, he uses images

He changed the way he lived and thought, and therefore changed his lifestyle. In reading Walden, one is drawn into a world where nature and man’s place in it becomes glorious and pure. Away from society, he is closer to the wisdom he had as a child. This priority of children over adults is shown when he says, “ I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”(Thoreau, para. 3). By living on Walden Pond, Thoreau was able to become the type of person he wanted to be, and through his writing of his experience and ideas, he was able to influence future generations as well.
Similar to Walden, freedom, and selfhood are explored in my Learner Choice novel, Red Rising. As in Walden, strong imagery is used to create a world that completely and totally immerses the reader. Man’s need for freedom is explored by means of a secret organization combined with a rebellion against a system engineered to keep people in their rigid places in society. Selfhood, as an expression of individual’s freedom, is explored as the characters, such as the protagonist, Darrow, develop and find out who they can become by means of going to the