The Bear William Faulkner - Richard E. Fisher (essay date 1963)
Richard E. Fisher (essay date 1963)
SOURCE: "The Wilderness, the Commissary, and the Bedroom: Faulkner's Ike McCaslin as Hero in a Vacuum," in English Studies, Vol. 44, 1963, pp. 19-28.
[In the following essay, Fisher correlates Isaac McCaslin's qualifications and limitations as a hero to the lessons Isaac learns from his family's history, his hunting experience, and his failed marriage.]
An evaluation of Ike McCaslin as a hero sheds light on a number of problems in Go Down, Moses, such as miscegenation, the conjunction of the slavery and wilderness themes, and the symbolism of Old Ben, Lion, and the wilderness. Ike's qualifications and limitations as a hero can best be seen as the corollary of his education, which is essentially the product of three factors.
In this book (my text is the Modern Library edition) Faulkner weaves the McCaslin saga into the larger fabric of his legend. Since a major concern of that...
[The entire page is 5167 words long]
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