The Bear William Faulkner | Blaise Hettich (essay date 1955)
Blaise Hettich (essay date 1955)
SOURCE: "A Bedroom Scene in Faulkner," in Renascence, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Winter, 1955, pp. 121-26.
[In the following essay, Hettich explains the meaning of the bedroom incident of "The Bear" in relation to the bear-hunt plot.]
By the time "The Bear" appeared in Go Down, Moses, it had been considerably expanded and developed from Faulkner's earlier magazine stories. The complexity of the enlarged tale and the difficulty in reading part IV were recognized by Malcolm Cowley in his note introducing "The Bear" in the Viking Portable edition, but on the same page Cowley calls it "in many ways the best" of Faulkner's stories. This may seem a bold claim for a combination of two worked-over hunting tales, a partially punctuated hodge-podge of family lore and philosophy, and an epilogue containing three comical incidents and some wilderness ritual. The obvious questions are: Do the additions to the...
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