This essay analyzes William Faulkner's "The Bear" from Go Down, Moses as an exploration of Southern mythology and cultural decline. Through close reading of characters such as Isaac, Old Ben, Sam Fathers, Lion, and Boon Hogganbeck, the essay argues that the annual hunt functions not as a practical pursuit but as a ritualistic preservation of the Old South's fading grandeur. As long as Old Ben remains alive and uncaught, the hunters maintain purpose and identity. The bear's death, however, signals the collapse of that shared legend, leaving the survivors unable to adapt to an industrialized modern world. Faulkner uses the hunt's end to illustrate the bitter truth that the mythologized South had no sustainable place in contemporary life.
"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 both to glorify the South as the American Shangri-La and to 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 through the importance of the hunt to its participants. As long as the hunt continues, their tradition will not die. Once the bear is finally slain, however, the hunters succumb to the same desperate state the rest of the South had already fallen into.
Many readers are quick to assume that the background of the piece serves as just that — a backdrop 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 presents nature as both powerful and profoundly melancholy. It is an age-old struggle in which man is pitted against nature. Old Ben is 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 an intimate bitterness accompanying it. The more controlling man attempts to be over nature, the more violently nature asserts herself. Every new season the hunters gather for the hunt, yet they can never slay the bear.
The background environment proves to be far more important than most readers would initially think. Not only does it play into the larger theme of 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 that resembles an ancient epic. As Isaac succeeds more and more as a hunter, he is drawn into a deeply 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 resembles myths and legends far more than any practical, modern-day pursuit.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American South fell into decline, both economically and emotionally. This period produced a wealth of literature and fantasy built around the myth of the South. Faulkner takes this myth and adds a bitter twist: the fantasy has absolutely no place in modern life. The killing of the bear marks the end of the characters' purpose. Characters like Sam Fathers, Boon Hogganbeck, General Compson, and even the ferocious dog Lion were subjects of great legend, yet had no 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 any 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, thereby allowing them to avoid the fate of obscurity and uselessness faced by many ordinary Southern citizens at the time. They were chasing the dream of the grandeur of the fallen South. The hunters always waited "so that Lion and Old Ben could run their yearly race. Then they would break camp and go home" (217).
"Old Ben's death ends the hunters' shared purpose"
"Sam and Lion die with dignity, preserving their legend"
"Surviving hunters cannot adapt to industrial modernity"
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