Civil Disobedience Term Paper

Civil Disobedience

Thoreau's Disobedience

Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience not only gives a startlingly strong argument against paying one's taxes (which is in itself a difficult task), it also gives a subtle but clear image of Thoreau himself. In this essay, the reader discovers a writer who is at once romantic and cynical, idealistically self-sacrificing and fiercely self-centered, areligious and mystical. It would be tempting to portray Thoreau as inconsistent or somehow duplicitous, but it would be more accurate to recognize him as merely complex.

The romantic in Thoreau comes through clearly when he describes his experience in jail, where "It was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night... It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me." He addresses his experience in jail like a medieval gothic adventure, and actually seems to be enjoying his monastic cell for the night. Flights of fancy overcome him, as he considers how free his soul must be while his body is confined, and how dark the hearts of his neighbors must be that they tolerate the existence of this jail. At the same time that he is so fanciful, Thoreau shows a certain cynical sense, for there is nothing particularly romantic about his understanding of America's position in her war with Mexico, and no sense of feudal loyalty to the state.Thoreau obviously considers revolution somewhat soberly, for after all his words, he suggests a revolution consisting of nothing more or less than tax evasion.

This mild-mannered revolution which he has in mind highlights another complexity to his character. On the one hand, Thoreau seems like quite the pleasure seeker, and seems to be a less-than-fervent revolutionary. After all, he says "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it..." (Thoreau) which is in itself not a precisely revolutionary statement. Yet at the same time, his suggestion that one need not make such grand sacrifices for a cause, he later suggests that he would accept death before he would become complicit to the crimes of the state. " But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?" (Thoreau) A critic might suggest that….....