William Faulkner's short novel The Bear
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William Faulkner's short novel The Bear is a very complex work for all its lack of length. One of the aspects of great importance is brought out through the contrast between the wilderness and the land, the land being that portion that has been cultivated and tamed by man. It may not be as civilized as the town or the city, but it is representative of civilization in the story and is civilized when compared to the wilderness. The land has come to symbolize a great deal to the people of the South and to Ike McCaslin during the course of this story. Ike is being inculcated into the ways of his people, but he comes to see where the people have strayed from the true path as embodied in the wilderness and in the majestic figure of the bear in particular. Ultimately, Ike repudiates the land, which means he repudiates the history of his people and the way they took the land from the Indians and used slave labor to cultivate it. This is cited by Richard Poirier as an example of "the displacement of many of the reader's assumptions about reality," a process called "relinquishment," and this word "also describes Isaac's rejection of his inheritance and his visionary possession of the wilderness" (Poirier 50). For Faulkner, the sin of slavery hangs over the South like a permanent cloud, a sin for which the people of each generation must atone. Ike learns in his encounter with the wilderness a profound lesson about life and about his own relationship to the land. His is a relig
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nd it is when Ike discards the last trappings of civilization that he comes face to face with the symbol of the wilderness, the bear, described as the biggest and strongest of all bears. As events unfold, Ike becomes the hunter closest to Sam Fathers in ability and understanding. He goes beyond the capabilities of the other civilized men, and his closeness is emphasized by the fact that he sees the bear up close. For Ike, the bear becomes a religious symbol, a spiritual being that embodies all that is good about the wilderness and that has an eternal quality which separates it from the fleeting world of civilized men. Ike is able to touch this spiritual realm as the others cannot.
Nature is seen in this story as something eternal and beyond the reach of civilization. Civilization can destroy portions of the natural world for a time, but nature will eventually return and encroach on civilization, taking back what has been taken from it. In the present, though, civilization is winning the fight and acting as a destructive force. Faulkner here turns the usual thinking around, since man talks of his battles with the elements as a triumph in which unruly nature is tamed form the benefit of mankind. In this story, the tradition
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2326
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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