Thoreau always begins with vision, which, in turn, dictates the form of his work. His vision demands the form his writing takes. Because of this, all of Thoreau’s books are not tightly unified. Each work is both a record of events and a poem, so there are many meanderings and digressions. This heterogeneity and unpredictability is what defines Thoreau’s works. To appreciate Thoreau’s work, one needs to see beyond the product and focus on the process that led to the book.
Walden, for example, mixes fact and fiction. Occurrences reported there were reshaped by the processes Thoreau went through: selection, reflection, ordering, heightening, and mythologizing.
References
Buell, Lawrence. “Thoreau and the Literary Excursion.” Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Cornell University Press, 1973, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1g69x7r.14.
the prevailing critical approach to Thoreau carries with it the somewhat misleading implication that literary architectonics was (or should have been) of immense concern to him. In fact, none of his books, not even Walden) is very tightly unified, nor probably designed to be, for the romantic excursion is as much a record of events and impressions as it is a poem. Even in the course of so analytical a work as Walden there are all sorts of meanderings and digressions
It is not that these passages bear no relation to the overall drift of the book, but that their charm lies more in their heterogeneity and unpredictableness than in their contribution to an overarching whole. Like a Whitman catalogue, Thoreau’s writing is to be more appreciated as process than as product, more for its irregular flow than for any patterns which can be abstracted from it, although the awareness of such patterns naturally enhances one’s pleasure in the work.
Like all literary travel narratives, Walden is an aesthetic mongrel, a mixture of the actual and the fictive, a report of real occurrences which have been reshaped, in different degrees, by the processes of selection, reflection, ordering, heightening, and mythologizing.