The Bear | An Unromantic Reading
In the following excerpt, the author explains that he does not believe that Isaac McCaslin acted honorably in rejecting his inheritance.
The usual reading of "The Bear" makes of Isaac McCaslin a kind of saint who, by repudiating his inheritance—the desecrated land upon which a whole people has been violated—performs an act of expiation and atonement which is a model for those acts that must follow before the curse upon the land is lifted Ike's repudiation of the land, at twenty-one, with which the tortuous inner section of "The Bear'' opens, and over which he and his cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, debate in the commissary, is seen in terms of what the reader understands Ike to have learned and attained under the...
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