The Bear William Faulkner | Richard Lehan (essay date 1965)
Richard Lehan (essay date 1965)
SOURCE: "Faulkner's Poetic Prose: Style and Meaning in The Bear," in College English, Vol. 27, No. 3, December, 1965, pp. 243-47.
[In the following essay, Lehan examines the descriptive language of "The Bear," explaining how Faulkner's verbal associations link characters and expand the story's theme.]
Faulkner's "The Bear," published in The Saturday Evening Post and in Go Down, Moses,1 has received its share of critical explication, and the pattern and meaning of the novel seems to have been thoroughly discussed. Certainly there is much that can be taken for granted: the bear is a symbol of nature; its death symbolizes the loss of the wilderness and all the wilderness represents, and the wilderness seems to represent a kind of Emersonian realm where man and nature are spiritually and emotionally at one, an Edenic world before the Fall where time does not exist and...
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