Tracking Thoreau explores the constellation of three central issues in Thoreau's oeuvre: nature, culture, and technology. Here, nature's own technology-above all, it's inherent ability to stray, to wonder, to transcend boundaries, to transform itself-mirrors the subject as it cultivates its "self" through composition, narration, and style. Such expression, like nature itself, involves unriliness, a transformation in the narrative, and in the subject of narrations (its self), that likewise allows it to change, go wild, or even lose its way.