Walden Two Literary Elements

Utopian novel

The action of the novel takes place in the 1940s, in a utopian settlement named Walden Two.

The narrator of the story is Burris and he presents the events from a subjective point of view.

Peaceful, progressive, neutral

There are no protagonists and antagonists in the novel. The reason behind this is that instead of analyzing a plot and various characters, the novel focuses on analyzing a society and how a community can reach the point where it can be classified as being a utopia.

The major conflict is an internal one. The groups of visitors who went to Walden Two all wonder if they should join the community or not and their struggles and thought process is presented in the novel.

The story reaches its climax when Burris, the narrator of the story, decides to join Walden and returns to the community.

Castle’s initial wariness and opinions about the community at Walden Two foreshadows the fact that he will be the only one who will still perceive the community as a threat instead of being something positive at the end of the novel.

When Frazier tries to convince the others that he feels just like any other member of the community is an understatement. In the later chapters it is revealed that he felt as a God because he was the founder of the communities and that he felt like the people in the communities were his children.

One of the things alluded in the novel is the idea that us, as humans and members of societies are never free of conditioning or from outside influence. Frazier points this out in the novel when he is called a fascist from trying to condition the people inside the community. When he is told those things, he kindly reminds the visitors that religion and various governments have done the same thing through propaganda and through fear of punishment. Through this, he tries to prove that his decisions and actions are justifiable and common.

In the tenth chapter, the visitors talk with the people in the community about the ways they like to spend their free time. In comparison with the rest of the world, who may choose to do nothing when they have free time, the people living in Walden Two engaged in different activities such as hiking in their free time. Frazier and the other members of the community pointed out that while the rest of the world may choose to do nothing in their free time, those who live in Walden reject the image promoted by the other communities. In those communities, leisure time is portrayed as being a time when someone just stays in bed and does nothing, lazing around and waiting for the time to pass. This was not the image the community tried to promote as they tried to convince their citizens to be as healthy and as active as possible.

There are no paradoxes found in the novel.

In chapter 34, the visitors see a sheep that has escaped the enclosure and refused to return because it was conditioned to believe that the fence was dangerous. Upon seeing this, Castle began mocking the system implemented at Walden, claiming it to be worthless and useless. He draws a parallel between the sheep and the people living in Walden and claims that at some point, Walden Two will fail as well.

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