The Bear William Faulkner | T. H. Adamowski (essay date 1973)
T. H. Adamowski (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "Isaac McCaslin and the Wilderness of the Imagination," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XVII, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 92-112.
[In the following essay, Adamowski finds that in "The Bear," "The Old People," and "Delta Autumn" Isaac McCaslin demonstrates a resistance to social assimilation. The critic attributes Isaac's nature to his formative experiences in the wilderness.]
I
Critics sometimes argue that Faulkner's Isaac McCaslin is a disappointment, not as a literary creation but as a moral agent. Their claim is that in Go Down, Moses Ike fails to bring to bear in his adult life certain values he learns in the wilderness from Sam Fathers. In particular they believe that Ike fails to bridge the gap between town and wilderness. What I should like to do here is to examine some of these claims and to look again at the Ike of the wilderness, for it seems to me that in the...
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