The Bear by William Faulkner

First published: 1942, in Go Down, Moses, and Other Stories

Type of work: Moral tale

Themes: Coming-of-age, nature, and race and ethnicity

Time of work: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi

Principal Characters:

• Issac” Ike” Mccaslin, the boy who comes to maturity during the course of the story
• Boon Hogganbeck, a hunter and outdoorsman
• The Bear, Old Ben, a huge and powerful animal who is a symbol of nature
• Lucas Quintus Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp, a cousin of Ike McCaslin, who is of mixed black-white ancestry
• Lion, the hunting dog that finally brings down the Bear and is killed in the struggle

The Story

William Faulkner’s long story “The Bear” contains two intertwined tales that reinforce and comment upon each other and that in turn take their place within both the larger confines of Go Down, Moses, the book in which “The Bear” appears, and all Faulkner’s writings. In many ways, “The Bear” is a distillation of Faulkner’s principal themes, concerns, and characters.

The main character in “The Bear” is Ike McCaslin, who enters the story at age sixteen but then is seen both younger and older as the plot reveals itself in brief, vivid scenes selected from a range of times. These scenes focus upon Ike’s enduring preoccupation: how to discover his proper place in nature and society. Therefore, in “The Bear,” the act of hunting is both literally and symbolically true. The hunt for Old Ben, the legendary bear that rules the woods in rural Mississippi, is the framework for the first three sections of this five-part story. Old Ben assumes almost supernatural stature among the hunters, such as Boon Hogganbeck, and in many ways he is identified with the wilderness itself. While the hunters return each year to track Old Ben, Ike McCaslin enters the woods with the different intention of becoming worthy of nature; because of this approach, he participates in the hunt mainly by observation.

It is not until the arrival of Lion, the fierce, mixed-breed dog, that the hunters have a chance of bringing down Old Ben. Lion, like the bear itself, seems to be an embodiment of nature, a force beyond human control or even comprehension; significantly, Lion responds only to Boon Hogganbeck, the towering, powerful man whose simple personality and views of life are closer to the natural order than are those of the other characters. Boon trains Lion, honing the dog’s skills until the climactic scene where the three figures—man, bear, and dog—are locked in an epic struggle of life and death. Old Ben and Lion die, with Boon left to grieve over them both; for Ike, these events have a profound and lasting impact on his life.

The second story within “The Bear” is Ike McCaslin’s search for the mixed-blood descendants of his family; he learns of them and the legacy left for them by reading the old record books in the family store. Chief among these is Lucas Beauchamp, and the uneasy, difficult relationship between Ike and Lucas forms much of the core of the final two portions of “The Bear.” Action slows as the hunting adventure gives way to Ike McCaslin’s profound but often troubled thoughts on the meaning of the land, Southern history, and the connections between whites and blacks.

Context

At its center, “The Bear” is a coming-of-age story, and Faulkner uses Ike McCaslin’s developing relationship with nature to symbolize and present the boy’s growing maturity. The contrast of human beings and the natural world is typical of many stories of this type, in which the young protagonist comes to a better realization of his or her own character. Examples that Faulkner would have known and possibly drawn upon are as varied as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), by Mark Twain, Captains Courageous (1897), by Rudyard Kipling, and “Youth” (1902), by Joseph Conrad. Young readers often find such tales especially intriguing, since they combine the excitement of an adventure tale with the satisfaction of self-discovery. In these stories, as in “The Bear,” nature serves as an external force against which the hero must struggle; in Faulkner, however, nature also provides a moral standard by which Ike McCaslin’s developing character is judged.

“The Bear” contains in a relatively short span all the major concerns of Faulkner’s writing: the impact of history, especially the Civil War, the South, the relationship of the races, and what Faulkner called in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech “the human heart in conflict with itself.” These issues are all presented in terms of Ike McCaslin’s coming-of-age, and through Ike’s consciousness, the events of “The Bear” are filtered, analyzed, and so achieve meaning. This story structure is typical of Faulkner’s fiction: In many other of his works—most notably, The Sound and the Fury (1929)—the story is told and retold by characters who try to puzzle out the truth and meaning of actions. The events in “The Bear” are not presented in strict linear sequence but are shown in a piecemeal fashion and make total sense only when the reader perceives what Ike must come to know: He is part of a larger order, containing society and nature. Both in content and technique, then, “The Bear” is highly typical of Faulkner.

In yet another sense “The Bear” is quintessential Faulkner, because while it stands by itself as an individual story, it is actually part of a larger whole—in this case, two larger wholes. First, it is part of the collection Go Down, Moses, and Other Stories; second, it is part of the complete body of Faulkner’s writings, which concentrates on what he called his “little postage stamp of native soil,” the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha in rural Mississippi. Characters and events are shared from book to book, story to story, and “The Bear” draws many persons and actions together.

Critics have recognized Faulkner as the preeminent American writer of the first half of the twentieth century, and “The Bear” has often been viewed as his outstanding single achievement. It combines, in a relatively narrow compass but with startling power and originality, power and eloquence, the highly individual characters, and the eternal, enduring concerns that have made William Faulkner such a towering genius of American literature.

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