SOURCE: "The Walk' as a Species of Walk Literature," in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol 12, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 87-94.

Here, American writer and educator Lopate ponders the act of walking as a literary theme and as a source of inspiration and muse and indicates its importance to Walser as a basis for meditations, observations and of freedom—which the language in "The Walk" demonstrates. Lopate also attempts to discern if the naivete and tone in "The Walk" is intentional or the result of mental illness.

A curious literary phenomenon, the walk story. In roughly the same era, the surrealists Louis Aragon (The Night Walker), Philippe Soupault (Last Nights of Paris) and André Breton (Nadja), the Irishman James Joyce, the American Henry Miller, and the Swiss writer Robert Walser were all composing epics of perambulation. What was it about the times that led authors to pick the walk...