'Economy,' then, is paired with 'Where I Lived': it speaks more of the way the entire American culture works, whereas 'Where I Lived' focuses on Thoreau's personal alternatives to the culture. Thoreau was just as interested in the process of forming ideas as he was in their final form as Martin Bickman says, he wishes to record 'volatile truths': 'Behind the structure of Walden and enacted within it, then, are two competing drives, one an immediate openness to flux, a responsiveness to a continually changing world, and the other a desire to rescue and preserve from that world something of permanent shape and beauty.' (47) Thus, for example, a chapter like 'Reading' contrasts in many ways with its succeeding chapter, 'Sounds.' Many chapters are paired in this way. Walden is a work of many gaps and contradictions, a work that seems to keep the reader off balance. It is not an easy book for a reader - especially a first time reader - to sort out and to find order in. The question of its structure has puzzled many critics, with some focusing on the cycle of the seasons as symbolic death and rebirth, and others on whether it is unified in spite of the oppositions it contains. Nor is it autobiography, although much of it is based on Thoreau's life at Walden pond. This book is not a novel, a narrative poem, or a play there is no clear story line, no plot line.

Chapter XIV: Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors.Chapter II: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau