The Bear

The Bear
William Faulkner
131 pages
Read in 10 days

Not proud of how many days it took to read this book. If I read just 13 pages a day on average, then it will take me 61 days to read The Way We Live Now. What can I say, life gets in the way sometimes.

There are just 5 chapters in the book and I think it can be broken down as follows:

1 and 3- The Hunt...respect for nature.
4 - The boy making sense of his life, his land, and his upbringing
5-The hunt again, trying to relive the same feeling, only the world has completely changed and the frontier is being taken over by industry.

I enjoyed this book tremendously and using the reference from Newsweek as a guide on how to view the book. I definitely saw the environmental themes.

The first 3 chapters detail the hunt for Old Ben, a large black Bear, who is an almost mythical creature for the locals. Many bullets and traps have been set for Old Ben , but he will not go down. I felt, through Faulkner's words, that I was indeed in the camp and out in the hunt. As I said before, the men look to the woods and Old Ben with respect. We watch the main character, a boy named Ike, as he grows up a more confident and accomplished hunter. When Old Ben is finally killed, with the aid of a wild dog that was trained by Sam Fathers (Ike's mentor), we get the feeling that life will never be the same.

In chapter 4, the writing is noticeably different. Ike is now 21 and the chapter starts with four paragraphs that have no period; a stream of consciousness style of writing. I felt the approach was deliberate to show an instability in Ike's life. As if we were him talking through all of his emotions in coming to the decision to give up the land that was part of his inheritance...There were times, however, in this chapter, where it got a little muddy for me. I could feel the sense of urgency as the boy states his alarm at the way the land has been taken from the Native Americans and the history of slavery...when he says:

I'm trying to explain to the head of my family something which I have got to do which I don't quite understand myself, not in justification of it but to explain it if I can. I could say I don't know why I must do it but that I do know I have got to because I have got myself to live with for the rest of my life and all I want is peace to do it in.

You see that he is trying hard to understand things that he does not understand.

The last chapter, he returns to the hunting grounds before a logging company comes through and destroys the land. He can hear the trains come closer and sees firsthand as industry quickly swallows up the forest.

Faulkner was definitely ahead of his time...this story was first published in the 1930s. The story, itself, takes place in the late 1800s. The themes here about the effects of industrialization and expansion on our shrinking wilderness is something that was not as hot a topic in the 1930s. It is an impressive story that is as appropriate today as it was then.

Next story is Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Perfect for the summer. Just wish we would have weather that resembles it soon!