E. B. White's "Walden" & Annie Dillard's "In the Jungle"

E. B. White's "Walden" and Annie Dillard's "In the Jungle" are essays about journeys the writers have taken that are designed as responses to journeys the writers have read about. White is sympathetic to the spiritual journey that Henry David Thoreau recounted in his Walden--the story of a two-year retreat in a small cabin. In a letter to Thoreau he contrasts the comic horrors of his modern pilgrimage to Walden Pond with the quiet, contemplative pleasures the nineteenth-century writer found there. Dillard, on the other hand, is out of sympathy with prevailing notions about travel and its purposes. She does not respond to any particular source but to the kind of general ideas that might be featured in travel posters or advertisements. Her method consists of interrogating some slogans about travel and supplying answers with the account of her own trip to Ecuador. White comically attempts to make the familiar strange while Dillard locates the familiar in a strange place.

These writers share, however, a sense that everything is not right about their world. Though their essays were written 40 years apart White and Dillard both feel that something is missing from their lives and they go looking for it. In the search it is the distance between humanity and nature that becomes the focus of their attention.

White's reading of Thoreau has made him aware of the terrible speed at which modern Americans move. The irony is that where Thoreau saw a danger in the pace of life i

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, she acknowledges her fascination at finding herself in this place--a fascination the reader shares. Piranhas and electric eels live in the water and Dillard shares a little moment of funny bravado as she says, "I dangled my fingers in the water, figuring it would be worth it" (221). She is not above reacting to the exotic nature of the location and shows that she's like her readers. There is, therefore, an autobiographical strain in each essay. The writers establish who they are in order to give the reader a standard against which his/her reaction can be measured. Whether White has a secretary or a son who needs a baseball glove he clearly identifies himself as the kind of middle-class, intelligent man who might have such things. Dillard says little about herself but the reader learns that she is a writer on a different scale from the Manhattan-Hollywood-Paris writer. She is a woman who is not afraid to undertake unusual, perhaps somewhat uncomfortable, trips and she is scornful of middle-class ideas of travel encapsulated in the ideal of going somewhere in order "to see the most spectacular" something (219). But both writers, it seems, also rely on the accumulated knowledge of their lives that their regular readers alr

Category: Literature - E