THE BEAR
by William Faulkner, 1942

There are four published texts of all or part of William Faulkner's classic "The Bear": "Lion," an experimental germ of the story published in Harper's Magazine in December 1925; "The Bear," a four-part hunting story published in the Saturday Evening Post on 9 May 1942; "The Bear," a chapter in the novel Go Down, Moses, which adds a fifth section to the Post version (as a new section four) published by Random House in late 1942; and "The Bear," the Post story placed in a new setting for Big Woods (1955). The two shorter versions can stand independently and are simpler and more straightforward than the longest version. Faulkner, however, always maintained that the version in Go Down, Moses could not be read independently of the rest of the book, even though the first printing of the novel (subsequently withdrawn) was titled, without Faulkner's knowledge, Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. Both short stories titled "The Bear" have been reprinted and anthologized. Whatever Faulkner's claim or intention, even the longer chapter from the novel can be read independently, although in doing so it loses some of its force of reference and powers of association.

This longest, fullest version of "The Bear" actually radiates in its turn from a commissary scene on the McCaslin plantation where two second cousins—ascetic Ike McCaslin and plantation manager McCaslin Edmonds—confront each other and their radically differing philosophies about the family ledgers found in the plantation store. Cass sees them as they were doubtless meant to be seen: as the careful accounting of property bought, earned, and dispensed. Ike, however, notes that black slaves of the McCaslin family (the parallel Beauchamp family) are also treated as property, so the apparently neutral ledger becomes for him a revealing and damning chronicle of Southern race relations and a singular family diary that suggests the present responsibility for the past.

The most elusive entries—about the slave girl Eunice and her daughter, to which no McCaslin has attended since earlier brothers quarreled about their significance—is unscrambled by Ike to show that their own forebear had violated a mulatto daughter. Horrified by this evidence of incest, Ike sets out to repair the damage by seeing that the descendants of the illegitimate line receive three times the money that was first promised them. What Cass sees as a sad if telling reminder of the Southern burden of the past, Ike sees as a tormented and bitter indictment of his own blood line and kin. In time his mission of reparation and reconciliation will end in defeat since one descendant is dead (or unlocatable), one has already claimed his inheritance as property and lives a proud and separate life, and another refuses to accept any guilt-ridden blood money. As a further penalty, Ike withdraws from the plantation and asks no further support, instead marrying a carpenter's daughter; when that marriage fails, he takes what little he can from the plantation and lives a lonely and isolated life in the city of Jefferson.

The added fourth section to "The Bear" for Go Down, Moses, then, is a compact history of the South in terms of race, economy, social life, clan caste, and class. The guilt of the past is visited upon the sons, and the sons find the burden unbearable, the situation irresolvable. The three sections that precede this take place at an earlier time, in the young boy Isaac's youth, when, at the age of 16, he joins the older hunters on their annual ritual hunt for "Old Ben," the gigantic wounded bear. This time, unlike other times, Isaac has a prescience that it will be their last hunt. "It was like the last act on a set stage. It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn't know what." When the killer dog Lion helps the part-Native American Boon Hogganbeck kill Old Ben after Old Ben has killed their dog, Ike's mentor Sam Fathers—half-black and half-Native American, the natural man of the woods—dies too, and Ike is reluctantly given permission to stay with Boon to bury the dog and the old man.

Although this is a moment of deep anguish for Isaac, he learns anew from Boon as he had from Sam about the cycles of nature, the cycles of birth and growth and death, of generation and decay, of gift and of loss. This is not what Cass understands; returning to fetch Ike, Cass accuses Boon of killing Sam, not understanding the ways of the woods, the ways of nature, or even the ways of the human heart. In retaliation, Boon refuses to return to the plantation. It is the first quarrel between Ike and Cass and looks forward directly to the commissary scene added later in order to give the full genealogical background to the cousins who no longer communicate.

The death of Old Ben takes the heart out of the annual fall hunting expeditions in northern Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Faulkner's fictional version of Lafayette County (just as the hunting camp is based on the camp of General Stone, the father of Faulkner's childhood friend and patron Phil Stone). But two years later, at the age of 18, Isaac feels the strong urge to return to the old hunting grounds in order to understand more completely the meaning of the bear, the old mentor, and the despairing Boon. He is filled with grief on the trip. The woods are being ransacked by a lumbering company that slowly but irrevocably destroys them forever. A train passes through the countryside, linking the commerce of the lumber camp with the economic forces of the town. A snake appears. And then, seated at the foot of the ancient, sacred gum tree, surrounded by chattering and scrambling squirrels, Boon is seen knocking powerfully and unsuccessfully at the barrel of his gun. "Get out of here! Dont touch them!" Boon shouts. "Dont touch a one of them! They're mine!" Although it is unclear if Boon is destroying or repairing his gun—or if, while living in a nature being gutted and annihilated around him, he is sane or mad—the sharp diminishment of the game available for the hunt and the sad demise of the one remaining hunter links the degeneration of history and the decline of humanity with the growth in a sense of possession.

Short versions of "The Bear" conclude at this point, although the longer version, with Ike seen at the age of 21 in the commissary, traces out the long life that follows as a much-diminishing thing. In either version, however, the forces of American commerce and materialism are placed in stark and damaging contrast with the beauty of the woods, the shared secrets of game to hunt, and the canny game that made a ritual of being hunted. What the fourth section adds is the matter of genealogy and the force of racial hatred. Reemphasizing the first chapter of Go Down, Moses, entitled "Was," the fourth part added to "The Bear" shows how possession of nature (the woods by the lumber industry) is analogous to the possession of slaves (to foster the cotton crops); how the impersonality, exploitation, and greed of the woods was matched in the whites' treatment of blacks, even when those blacks were their own descendants. This understanding of brother conquering brother (and cousin, cousin) suggests to the older Ike that the Civil War has never really ended, that brotherhood is a myth.

Ike's condemnation is searing and total; the last scene in the longer version—in which Ike's laughing wife refuses ever to give herself to him again, although she had wanted both him and his inheritance—may suggest that she and the lonely, ineffective Ike have both been somewhat maddened by their experiences. Only the later chapter, "Delta Autumn," in which the 70-year-old Ike hunts deer, not bear, shows that he continues to live, but his life is now void of purpose. When he denies a mulatto woman who turns out to be his old blood-relative, he also seems himself, finally, woefully inadequate to his own best intentions and uneducable to the lessons he once thought he had learned.

Except for a few early novels and two later ones, Faulkner spent his entire career charting through fiction the history of the South by way of its chief family lines. But only in Go Down, Moses are so many generations pulled together, and only in "The Bear" is the matter of race—the chief concern and sin of that history—made so powerfully and singularly clear. It is Faulkner's strongest testament to the past.

—Arthur F. Kinney