The Bear William Faulkner - W. R. Moses (essay date 1953)
W. R. Moses (essay date 1953)
SOURCE: "Where History Crosses Myth: Another Reading of The Bear'," in Accent, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Winter, 1953, pp. 21-33.
[Below, Moses describes the conflict between the mythic patterns and historical realities of "The Bear" in terms of the character development of Isaac McCaslin]
This reading is made in terms of the following simple propositions: Myth does not rationally "explain" anything and perhaps does not even justify anything, but it does dramatize the human situation, appealing to and flattering the various non-rational interests that principally make us men. People live by it, or may do so. History—the brute sequence of events—lacks dramatic structure; study of it may permit explanation or justification, but appeals principally if not entirely only to the predilections of rationality, and is likely to be irrelevant to the making of a useable pattern of individual life. Automatically people live...
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