[In the essay below, Bradford analyzes the dramatic significance and thematic implications of the concluding section of "The Bear."]

The scene that concludes William Faulkner's novella, "The Bear," provides both a summary of and a judgment upon the action preceding it. The theme of "The Bear" is the importance, to individuals and to societies, of their capacity to sustain that balance of "pride and humility" which Faulkner often calls "endurance." The episode in which the protagonist, Isaac McCaslin, comes upon a manic Boon Hogganbeck beneath a great tree full of frightened squirrels dramatizes the consequences for man of the failure to practice the endurance which the total story (as well as the larger unit, Go Down, Moses, of which it is a part) "recommends." It is the capstone of and the key to a large design. "The Bear" develops toward this particular resolution by regular and organically related stages, each of which follows from what has immediately preceded it and makes more inevitable the shape which that resolution will assume. Distracted by the pleasure they take in the character of Isaac McCaslin or the merit of his de post facto theorizing, some critics have found a stumbling block in the conclusion of the great hunting story. Though eager to extract from the tale some simplistic and sanguine counsel for troubled times, they sense in its ending something other than a promise of easy hope. And they should. For, like the interior monologue of Ike (sixty-plus years after) which closes its sequel, "Delta Autumn," the last two pages of "The Bear" (pp. 330-31) imply an ominous future for any who would approach Nature as Boon does when Ike finds him seated beneath that tree; and, again like that monologue, these pages indicate that no other future can be expected, given the impious spirit which Faulkner believes has possessed our age.

In order to reconstruct the framework which makes fully intelligible this grotesque tableau of the maddened woodsman, his broken gun, and the lone tree full of game in whose shadow he raves, we must look back to section four of the novella, to the exchange in the plantation commissary between young McCaslin and his cousin cum father, McCaslin Edmonds, in which Ike tells his kinsman what he has learned about man's proper relationship to Nature from his training and experience in the forest—from Sam, Old Ben, the other elder woodsmen, and the wilderness itself. Ike finds in the hunt, in the true hunter's reverent approach to the game he pursues and sometimes kills—and especially in the mutual testing, measuring, and self-renewal which the big bear and the men who keep annual rendezvous with him share—a parable, a miniature of the preordained and providentially intended role of man as steward of a creation and a particular place in creation with which he must "cope," though he cannot dominate or utterly control it. He tells Cass (articulating in his statement the assumptions underlying the pattern of history teleologically interpreted, in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha Cycle), "He [God] created man to be His overseer on the earth . . . not to hold for himself. . ." (Go Down, Moses, p. 257). For the hunters the game in the forest, and especially Old Ben, are counters for that "brooding" and numinous presence in Nature, the Arbiter and "Umpire" (Go Down, Moses, p. 181) whom, like the mystery of the land itself, man must have the courage to face and the humility to acknowledge if he is to achieve genuine self-knowledge. He must "endure" his position in relation to this ill-defined but transcendent presence if he is to "cope" with his contingent status in a universe arbitrarily arranged to suit something other than his convenience, endure and prevail over his condition. The alternatives are passivity (fatalism) and aggression (Promethean self-assertion), either humility or pride alone. Ike takes the former of these disastrous courses; he ignores the necessary connection of stewardship or the holding of place, property, and position in "fee simple"—for God—and power over what is held. But from Boon's words and actions in the Gum Tree Scene, we can infer that he, like the leaders of his culture, has chosen the latter.

But if Ike's long dialogue with Cass explains much about the significance of the final pages of "The Bear," an examination of the fictional order or total sequence of episodes of which these pages are a climacteric tells even more. Sections one, two, and three of the novella are, so far as structure is concerned, a unit. They form together the double story of the last years of Old Ben and the concomitant emergence of Isaac McCaslin, the last of his line, as a man and hunter. The one undercuts the other. The enveloping action of historical change and cultural decline or disorientation represented by the passing of the wilderness and its presiding spirit sets in sharp relief and gives poignance to Ike's inheritance of the mantle of Sam Fathers—of his priestly place as spokesman of the old order. The spirit of reverence, the courage to accept and endure the human condition according to the terms of the God-given covenant, is lost by most of his elders just as Ike begins to understand and share in that spirit. And even he is unable or unwilling to transfer it from the shelter of the hunting camp to the arena of the great world outside the big bottom. Section four gives us not only a philosophical explanation of the elusive elegiac implications of the death of a single bear but also an insight into why Ike will hereafter in the McCaslin saga serve only as gloss on and chorus to the further progression of the Zeitgeist toward an apocalypse which he deplores. Ike, like Sam, might have served as at least a stay against such confusion. As "The McCaslin," the patriarch, he would have been of great use to all the inhabitants of his world who had need of a man of his humanity; he might even have forestalled the return of his family's history (in "Delta Autumn") to the very infamy which made him want to stand aside. But once we have witnessed his refusal to "endure" history and his resignation from it in search of an impotent "freedom" and purity, we are prepared to see the shadows deepen (pp. 299-300)—to see the public and general triumph of the forces whose advent had made it time for Ben to die. In section five the darkness falls; the enveloping action finally encapsulates and negates the lonely hunter and the hopeful narrative of his "education"—though even here perhaps to clarify in unmistakable terms the full burden of the Gum Tree episode, Faulkner reaffirms the freedom of the protagonist from the self-assertive implications of the non-enduring spirit.

The structure of section five itself reflects the design of the entire novella. It moves from a reconsideration and recapitulation of Isaac McCaslin's "progress" toward perfect fellowship with a given and inscrutable natural order to a qualification of the hopeful suggestions of this communion and from thence to a total denial of them. And in this ordering of its contents and the straightforward juxtaposition in that order of materials or themes already developed earlier in the novella, it offers in dramatic terms the plainest possible indication of the entire fable's burden. Section five begins with the announcement: "He [Ike] went back to the camp one more time . . ." (p. 315). After adverting briefly to a conversation of young McCaslm with Major de Spain, in which the former makes arrangements for his trip, and after assuring us that the death of Ben did mean the end of an era, that the trip will be valedictory, the narrative moves swiftly to depict the journey itself. Boon, who will join Ike at the camp (as arranged by De Spain), is now serving the lumbering company as marshal of Hoke, the railhead of the company's short line where Ike will leave his horse. His new employment, like the earlier assurances that the doom hanging over the forest sanctuary of the old balanced code will not be revoked, further prepares us for the section's (and the story's) conclusion. But Boon does not meet Ike at Hoke, or even at the place where the wagon road to the old camp meets the tracks. Instead Ash, the camp cook and Negro handyman, picks him up. As he leaves the train, Ike is troubled with the new meaning the "diminutive locomotive" and its incursion into the wilderness has taken on for him. He reflects on earlier trips he has made on it and observes, "It had been harmless then" (p. 320). Now it puts him in mind of "the lingering effluvium of . . . death" or a "snake" (pp. 321, 318). When Ike gets into the wagon, Ash tells him that Boon is in the woods and expects to meet him at the gum tree. With this announcement the last thread is spun out and we are ready for the denouement. The young huntsman moves up into the woods toward the grave of Sam Fathers and falls into a recollective reverie. The stage is set.

As he muses, the memory of Faulkner's protagonist takes him back to the day when he slew his first deer, and especially to Ash's reaction to his success. Like the hound in section three of the novella, the little bitch who had to go in on Old Ben just once to prove herself a dog (p. 199), Ash is provoked by the action of another to reach out after the token of his right to a place among his own kind which a part in the hunt would give to him. There is nothing particularly "racial" about his dilemma. His place in the camp is and has been what his role there has earned for him. Sam Fathers, who outside of the woods has little more social status than Ash, is the peer or even (at least in an unofficial way) patriarchal chieftain of the white hunters in the camp. And Ash is normally too down-to-earth to be interested in pitting his energies, much less his life, against wild creatures for which he has no need. But, as the shells he saved over the years make evident, he has felt the impulse to participate in the ritual at least once. After Ash sulks and refuses to cook, he is indulged; but the results of his hunt are abortive. No deer are taken; and on the way back to camp he loses his ancient, unmatched cartridges firing at a little bear he finds in his path. Ike recalls the old Negro, whose self-respect has been threatened by the manly accomplishments of a boy, searching in the cane near the spot where he misfired. His impotence as a huntsman, coupled with his attachment to the useless old shells (which in possession he converts into a pathetic prop for his pride—a means of asserting that he could hunt if he so wished, act if he so willed) make of Ash as young Ike remembers him a burlesque and foil to what the boy will shortly behold. With Ash and his impotent weapon, his fat little bear, and his fumbling rage, we edge still closer to the apogean moment.

Ike's reverie moves from past to present: from thoughts of the old Negro's pathos to pious tributes to the inscrutable order of Nature, as he realizes he has reached, not the gum tree, but the knoll where Sam and the great dog, Lion, lie at rest. The memory of Ash on the hunt (pp. 323-26) and the Gum Tree scene, in one sense, frame the moment at the grave (pp. 326-30). This is not to say that the series of three parts is not a progression. Ash's comic gesture of pride and Ike's recommitment to that species of endurance which enables him to celebrate in the cycle of seasons his own finitude—a humility which, he again makes clear, is not in his nature balanced with pride in responsibilities—begin the rapid narrowing of focus upon and specific dramatization of the disintegration of a moral order. This narrowing and concretizing concludes only when we come to the scene beneath the tree. It is most natural that Ike should think of the discipline he acquired there as he moves again through the woods, that he should think of Ash's relation to that discipline as he leaves him to enter the woods, and that he should give us his most lyric and impressive expression of the "understanding" of the human condition with which that discipline has endowed him as he reaches the "temple" of his faith, the burial ground. And nothing could make plainer that the final episode of section and story marks the victory of a vision not at all like that of the protagonist than does the placement of this episode immediately after Ike's moving restatement of his position. But the dynamic of section five (like that of the entire novella and indeed of all of Go Down, Moses) is not simply linear. Lines of force run back and forth, zigzag, throughout the story as they move it forward. By setting between the parody of endurance and the tableau of violent non-endurance the boy's tribute to his spiritual birthplace and to the ordered immortal sequence, the "deathless and immemorial phases of the mother" (p. 326) which he has learned there to accept—and by including in the vista of woods, graves, and mutilated paw above which he accepts in that affirmation the new totem of the wilderness, the snake—Faulkner draws in and ties together the threads he has run out. He thereby makes the Gum Tree Scene a thematic as well as dramatic climax of the novella and not of just its fifth section. The juxtaposition of these details in this particular three-part pattern at the end of this particular five-section sequence should convince us that, for the time, non-endurance has won out, that something more than Ben died in and with Ben, that the numen which once wore the visage of the bear or the many-pointed stag now wears the aspect of the serpent who, as Allen Tate writes, "counts us all."

Isaac's salute to the huge rattlesnake which guards the graveyard knoll immediately precedes the Gum Tree Scene. His very words ("Chief . . . "Grandfather") are affirmations of allegiance both to Sam's legacy and to the authority Sam served. They complete his identification with the old Indian's spirit of coexistence with Nature which Sam had cultivated in him. The Indians of the old South had a "traditional reverence for rattlesnakes." Their "Umpire" or "Arbiter," like the one to which Faulkner and his characters often refer, took on various forms (depending upon the role to be played in an encounter with man)—an eagle in council, a great bear to young men in search of their manhood, a stag in the hunt for meat, corn to the farmer—and seems to be in character as a snake now when scourging or death is in the offing. As Sam had earlier accepted the necessity of Ben's death, Ike accepts the snake; and with it he accepts (and moves us to accept) the justice of a more concrete and yet elusive trope which follows. The lifted hand and the honorific words in the old tongue tell us plainly that the Fall has been re-enacted in this garden. Natural providence, God, or the Great Spirit (it is unwise to be too specific about the name) has now appropriately punitive implications which are hopeful only in so far as they bespeak an ultimate justice which is potentially redemptive by being punitive. Here and elsewhere Ike places his hopes for the future of his people with this justice. But this discussion takes us beyond "The Bear" to the stories which stand immediately after it in Go Down, Moses. Only the severity of the judgment of the Gum Tree Scene can therefore give occasion for comfort.

It is particularly appropriate that Faulkner used Boon in the dark conclusion of "The Bear." For Boon is an unselfconscious victim of the spread of the virus of non-endurance around him, a spread made possible in part by the dereliction of his society's natural leadership; and Boon had once been given a place of the highest honor as the instrumental cause of Old Ben's assumption, a place which could have belonged to him only as one who was totally free of the new presumption. Boon's performance under the gum tree indicates how far and how rapidly the toxin has spread.

As to the final scene itself, we have been reminded throughout section five that Ike will eventually meet Boon in the woods. But the spectacle of his fury and his snarl at his young friend, especially as it comes hard after the religious calm of the scene on the knoll, is nevertheless surprising. The total rhythm of the section gives to the ultimate moment all possible impact and purchase upon our imagination. But its intensity, however well prefaced, would be unendurable if prolonged. Ike's attention is called to Boon by the noise the giant woodsman is making while smashing the barrel of his shattered gun upon its stock. His hysteria is of frustration born. The gun was for him (in his new connection as the co-worker of the locomotive and the lumber mill) a means of establishing a dominion over Nature, represented in all her bounty by the squirrel-filled tree above him. The association of guns and other mechanical devices with the prideful attempt to dominate or "own" Nature was established much earlier in "The Bear" when Ike had his first face-to-face encounter with Ben (pp. 208-209). That Boon has, like his Indian forefathers, learned from his more "civilized" associates to desire full and single possession of Nature as a sanction for his pride we are assured by what he says to Ike as the boy approaches: "Don't touch them. . . . They're mine!" Though his impotence with a gun is proverbial throughout the novella, Boon had earlier shared with the regulars in the hunting camp a sense of the decorums which made possible their fellowship with one another and, together, with the great bear. But the "greeting" he here gives to a member of that company is proof that he is now of another fellowship; from the immediate context in which his words appear we can determine that he has become a part (and type) of the presumptuous and cowardly attempt to escape creaturehood, the attempt which leads the "new" men to abuse the land, to "gnaw at the flanks" of the wilderness in fear of what it suggests to them about their importance and place in an ultimately mysterious order (p. 193). What has happened to him at the end of "The Bear" is what an older Ike (perhaps thinking back to this moment) foresees in "Delta Autumn" will happen to all who would cancel their tenure upon the land in and with a spirit of self-aggrandizement, who would acquire an artificial sense of importance at the expense of what they were given in trust. Their success will be their scourge, a Sisyphean torment appropriately created by their wrongful use of the gifts of God and followed by a discovery that these gifts have (because of their crime) become at once theirs and not theirs. As Ike puts it, "The people who have destroyed it [the land] will accomplish its revenge" (p. 364). Ike believes it must be so because God has discovered of His creations that "apparently they can learn nothing save when underlined in blood" (p. 286). Human attempts having failed to halt the spread of the non-enduring spirit (which the first four sections of the story affirm), providence will have to restore the old order of pride and humility from without. With that note, looking forward to a more general punishment and backward to the end of an "enduring," prelapsarian time, "The Bear" concludes.

Some years ago Robert Penn Warren remarked that Faulkner's fiction presented American criticism with its greatest contemporary challenge. And although in the intervening years the response to his call has been voluminous, Warren's statement still holds true for today. Since the Nobel Prize Address (in which the contemporary world heard a note of reassurance which gladdened its heart—and then almost at once tried to translate that note into the idiom of its own obsessive political and technological eschatology), Faulker's critics have devoted themselves to the search for his "message." In the meantime many have failed to consider the simple but carefully weighted words with which he repeatedly reaffirmed his very old-fashioned patriarchal world-view, words like "pride," "humility," "cope," and "endure." In examining the puzzling design of some of his most important fictions, they have forgotten what Conrad Aiken recognized long ago: that it is Faulkner's characteristic practice to "withhold his meaning," to move from a guarded to a more open exposition of his themes, so as to endow them with the greatest possible authority. That Aiken's observation is correct can be proved out of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust, The Unvanquished, Requiem for a Nun, and many of the short stories. The attempt has here been made to demonstrate that it applies equally well to the unfolding structure of "The Bear." Once the centrality of the endurance theme to the corpus of Faulkner's achievement is recognized, the structural similarity and integrity of most of his work and the dimensions of his commentary upon his times will be much more apparent.