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 religious experience transcending the immediate events and tying Ike to the world of myth, to a world bigger than life and embodying universal truths understood by the Indians and forgotten by the civilized men who cultivated the land, and this religious experience is embodied in a variety of symbolism, from the whiskey which the hunters drink as a religious libation to the blood spilled as an evocation of the blood of Christ (Levin 79-80).
The heavy hand of the pas...