Reflection on "battle of the Ants," Henry David Thoreau

Reflection on “The Battle of the Ants”, Henry David Thoreau

“The Battle of the Ants” is an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” a non-fictional book Thoreau wrote while living on his own in a cabin in the wilderness for 2 years during the 1840’s. Thoreau chose to live this lifestyle in order to find out what really was important in life, in his words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” In “Walden” Thoreau describes many of the scenes that he is privileged to witness, one being an epic battle between two species of ants, one a small red species, the other, black ants nearly twice the size of their opponents. In immortalizing such a trivial event in his book, Thoreau assigns great importance to it. At the same time, however, Thoreau also personifies the ants by comparing them to humans, and their battles to the battles of the ancient Greeks and Trojans. By making what