The bear by William Faulkner

¶ … Bear

The True Meaning of the Hunt

Man was dispossessed of Eden," (Faulkner 246), since the loss of the Civil War, the American South has always carried a sense of bitter nostalgia within everyday life and events. Southern authors, like William Faulkner, used this melancholy tone as a way both glorify the South as the American Shangri La, as well as show the bitterness of that cultural history as having no place in a modern world. "The Bear," a piece in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, represents this ideology with the importance of the hunt to its participants. As long as the hunt continues, their tradition will not die. Once the bear was finally slain, the hunters succumbed to the same desperate state the rest of the South had fallen into.

Many are quick to assume that the background of the piece serves as just that, a background, for the larger conflict between man and nature. The story focuses on the character of Isaac and Old Ben, the seemingly immortal bear. Old Ben embodies the will of nature, and is seen by the hunters as an immortal creature, "the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered childless and absolved of mortality," (Faulkner 186). This image represents an image of nature as both powerful, but also depressing. It is an age old struggle, where man is pit against nature. Old Ben in powerful in strength and will; however, he is the sole animal to withstand the force of man. Therefore, there is no glory in his role without a very intimate bitterness. The more controlling man attempts to be over nature, the more nature will violently assert herself. Therefore, every new season the hunters gather for the hunt, but yet they can never slay the violent bear.

However, the background environment proves to much more important than most would think. Not only does it help play into the larger theme concerning man's struggle with nature, but it also incorporates its own subplot into the story. Despite their continual failure to kill Old Ben, the hunters still search for him "in the thick great gloom of ancient woods and the winter's dying afternoon," (Faulkner 192). Faulkner describes the hunt for Old Ben in a tone which seems more like an ancient epic. When Isaac succeeds more and more as a hunter, he is opened up to a very mystical world, "He had killed his buck and Sam Fathers had marked his face with the hot blood, and in the next November he killed a bear," (201). The hunt resembled myths and legends more than practical modern day hunts.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American South fell into decline, both economically and emotionally. This time period thus produced much literature and fantasy focused around the myth of the South. Faulkner takes this myth and adds a bitter twist with the idea that this fantasy has absolutely no place in modern life. The killing of the bear was the end of the characters purpose; characters like Sam Fathers, Boon Hogganbeck, General Compson, and even the ferocious dog Lion were the subject of great legend without any practical use in the modern world after the death of Old Ben. As a child Isaac recognized that they were upholding an ancient tradition without the true intent of fulfilling it, "To him, they were not going out to hunt bear and deer but to keep a yearly rendezvous with the bear which they did not even intend to kill," (Faulkner 186). The hunt gave the characters a purpose in life, therefore avoiding the fate of obscurity and uselessness faced by many average Southern citizens at the time. They are chasing the dream which was the grandeur of the fallen South. The hunter's always waited "so that Lion and Old Ben could run their yearly race. Then they would break camp and go home," (217).

When Old Ben was finally taken down, the hunters who had spent so long in pursuing him then had nothing left to contribute to their legend. Their purpose was completed, much like the South's long-gone glory days. Most of those who made up their party had little other talents than to track and hunt. The stray Mastiff, Lion, who "inferred not only courage and all else that went to make up the will and desire to pursue and kill, but endurance, the will and desire to endure beyond all imaginable limits of flesh in order to overtake and slay" (Faulkner 227), would in no way fir into any other environment than the experience of the hunt. The dog was born to chase and kill, not exactly what you would describe as perfect assets to have in a house pet. However, Lion got the luxury of being slain doing what he was the best.

Unlike many of the hunters, the dog along with Sam Fathers, did not have to live to see themselves become obsolete. Rather, they died during the making of their legend, therefore preserving their dignity by not falling into the unknown after their purpose was complete. Sam Fathers, "the old man, the wild man not even one generation from the woods, childless, kinless, peopleless," (236) had met the same fate as Lion. The pair were two wild to turn face and live in a civilized world once the hunt was over. Faulkner needed these two to die to further his point in the end of an era. They both resembled Old Men in many ways, and with the dying of all three, there was no hope for their traditions to continue.

For those characters who were not so lucky to meet their end during the hunt succumbed to their increasing insignificance. The members of the hunting party who survived the actual hunt proved to have no place in the outside world. The character of Boon eventually goes mad at the very end of the story. In fact, his madness is what the piece leaves the reader to digest. He has digressed into less than human, being "evocative of all knowledge and an old weariness and of pariah-hood and of death," (314). Boon has no place in a more industrial society. His intimate relationship with the dog Lion shows how he works well within a natural and uncivilized setting, and not in normal modern day society. Eventually, for the characters that remain, the fairy tale of the old South slowly turns into a nightmare, "Don't you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse?" (266).