The Bear William Faulkner | Sanford Pinsker (essay date 1972)
Sanford Pinsker (essay date 1972)
SOURCE: "The Unlearning of Ike McCaslin: An Ironic Reading of William Faulkner's 'The Bear'," in Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts, Vol. 12, Spring, 1972, pp. 35-51.
[In the essay below, Pinsker considers the ironic implications of Isaac McCaslin's repudiation of his inheritance, suggesting that the character's ambivalence toward Southern mores reflects Faulkner's own attitude.]
Critics have approached Ike McCaslin from many angles, but always with a certain amount of reverence. To Jungian critics he is the archetypal Hero, to Christian critics he is (naturally) Christ, and to hundreds of Freshmen, he is the protagonist in an American bildungsroman.1 None of these views, however, completely recognizes the possibility of either irony or aesthetic distance between Ike McCaslin and his creator.
Because Ike is the center of consciousness and moral filter for "The Bear," his...
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