Like Thoreau's "Walden" and Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac", Abbey adopts a style of narrative in "Desert Solitaire" that compresses multiple years of observations and experiences into a singular narrative that follows the timeline of a single cycle of the seasons. In this process, many of the events and characters described are often fictionalized in many key respects, and the account is not entirely true to the author's actual experiences, highlighting the importance of the philosophical and aesthetic qualities of the writing rather than its strict adherence to an autobiographical genre.