The Bear William Faulkner - Daniel Hoffman (essay date 1969)
Daniel Hoffman (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: "William Faulkner: The Bear'," in Landmarks of American Writing, edited by Hennig Cohen, Basic Books, 1969, pp. 341-52.
[In the following essay, Hoffman explicates the principal themes of "The Bear. "]
William Faulkner's story, "The Bear," has come to occupy a place in his work similar to that held by "Billy Budd" in Herman Melville's and by The Old Man and the Sea in Ernest Hemingway's. All three tales are relatively brief, and were written after the major novels by these authors, works of which these stories seem to be epitomes. Faulkner's tale comes after most of the books in his Yoknapatawpha saga, following The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Hamlet (1940). "The Bear" in its present form appeared in 1942, as one of the seven interrelated stories in his book Go Down,...
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