The Bear William Faulkner | M. E. Bradford (essay date 1967)
M. E. Bradford (essay date 1967)
SOURCE: "The Gum Tree Scene: Observations on the Structure of 'The Bear'," in The Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer, 1967, pp. 141-50.
[In the essay below, Bradford analyzes the dramatic significance and thematic implications of the concluding section of "The Bear."]
The scene that concludes William Faulkner's novella, "The Bear," provides both a summary of and a judgment upon the action preceding it. The theme of "The Bear" is the importance, to individuals and to societies, of their capacity to sustain that balance of "pride and humility" which Faulkner often calls "endurance." The episode in which the protagonist, Isaac McCaslin, comes upon a manic Boon Hogganbeck beneath a great tree full of frightened squirrels dramatizes the consequences for man of the failure to practice the endurance which the total story (as well as the larger unit, Go Down, Moses, of which it is a...
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