t has a hold on the present in Faulkner's stories, including The Bear, a story in which traditions and contemporary life intermix during the hunt. Faulkner infuses the story with a political and social structure related to the slave-owning past of the South and showing the effect of that past on the present. Jean-Paul Sartre noted the way Faulkner treated past and present and states,
The past here gains a surrealistic quality; its outline is hard, clear, and immutable. The indefinable and elusive present is helpless before it; it is full of holes through which past things, fixed, motionless, and silent, invade it (Tuck xiv).
However, Irving Howe finds that the past as used in "The Bear" differs from Faulkner's usual concerns:
Like so many of Faulkner's novels and stories, "The Bear" turns to the past, but for once not a past of historical actuality or a mere legendary history. The retreat to the wilderness which forms this remembers past is set in a recognizable moment of the late nineteenth century . . . it forms an Eden co-existing with society but never mistaken for society by those who come to it for purification and refreshment (Howe 92).
Ike is a young man who is being initiated by the adults into their twice-a-year hunting trips under the leadership of Major DeSpain. These trips are thought by the participants to be returns to an earlier way of life and thinking--the men cut themselves off from civilization and venture deep into the wilderness in search of their prey. There is a good deal of ritual observance in the actions of these hunters as they act out of a desire to pay tribute to their ancestors and to the primitive instincts they believe still live within themselves.
The relationship between the land and the wilderness is seen in the figure of Sam Fathers, a man of mixed blood whose position in the social group changes according to whether the group is in the wilderness or in civilization. In civili...