The Bear

“He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area almost a hundred miles square had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man.”

The McCaslin family plantation is not Isaac’s only inheritance. He also inherits, almost instinctively, a relationship with Old Ben and the territory he dominates. Though he does not gain ownership or money from this latter inheritance, he comes to prefer it to his familial inheritance for reasons he has a difficult time articulating to McCaslin.

“That doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes […], and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant.”

Here, Faulkner characterizes the destruction of the wilderness not as one or more dramatic events, but rather as a slow accumulation of small annoyances. Though the people in this scenario are clearly outmatched by the wilderness and the bear who prowls it in terms of strength, grandeur, nobility, and longevity, the wilderness is “doomed” to lose because of the relentless, incessant nature of the assault. This larger conflict plays out on a micro level when Boon, the most pitiful character, kills the seemingly immortal bear. This quote also reveals why Old Ben’s death might affect Sam so deeply: As an icon of the forest’s invincibility, Old Ben’s death shows that the wilderness is, in fact, vulnerable to human intervention.`

“‘It’s the gun,’ Sam said. […] ‘You will have to choose.’” 

When Isaac struggles to spot Old Ben, Sam suggests that Old Ben has been watching Isaac but will not allow Isaac to see him so long as he carries a gun. The choice Isaac faces is not so much between technology and nature as between security and vulnerability. Only by making himself vulnerable, by approaching Old Ben on Old Ben’s terms, does Isaac induce the bear to make himself vulnerable so that he can be seen. This marks the beginning of a relationship between Isaac and Old Ben that is marked, surprisingly, by a certain mutual respect.

“It was as if Lion were a woman—or perhaps Boon was the woman. That was more like it—the big, grave, sleepy-seeming dog which, as Sam Fathers said, cared about no man and no thing; and the violent, insensitive, hard-faced man with his touch of remote Indian blood and the mind almost of a child.”

The relationship between Boon and Lion is one sided, with Boon admiring Lion’s strength, even as Lion offers no regard or affection to Boon. Boon’s admiration for Lion’s raw power, with little or no thought to how that power is directed, reveals his short-sightedness and symbolizes a broader human obsession with power for its own sake. Taken together, the combination of brute force and stupidity proves lethal to Old Ben—and to the environment he calls home.

“You aint even got a good hand-hold where this boy was already an old man long before you damned Sartorises and Edmondses invented farms and banks to keep yourselves from having to find out what this boy was born knowing and fearing too maybe but without being afraid, that could go ten miles on a compass because he wanted to look at a bear none of us had ever got near enough to put a bullet in and looked at the bear and came the ten miles back on the compass in the dark; maybe by God that’s the why and the wherefore of farms and banks.”

General Compson berates McCaslin for telling Isaac to return to school rather than allowing him to stay at camp for a few more days. Compson insinuates that the real purpose administrative social structures serve is to keep cowardly people from having to face the harshness of life in the wilderness. It is fear, then, of the unknowable and disordered wilderness that leads men like McCaslin to seek to exert control over it, though they destroy it in the process. Isaac, on the other hand, establishes himself as a contradictory force to that presented by McCaslin, earning the respect of more nature-oriented people like General Compson.

“He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood.”

As Isaac attempts to explain his reasoning for rejecting his inheritance, he presents his ideal of communal stewardship within the framework of a Biblical creation myth. That ideal is contrasted with the petty competition and selfishness he observes around him. As attractive as Isaac’s ideals may appear, he fails to articulate them either persuasively or practically enough to spark any real change, demonstrating the difficulty of translating beliefs into action.

“And I know what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows.” 

When Isaac and McCaslin disagree in their readings of the Bible, Isaac explains the basis of his interpretation. His confidence that truth can be discerned intuitively and emotionally, as opposed to purely rationally, is reflected in his strong convictions which he sometimes has difficulty putting into words. McCaslin, on the other hand, makes primarily logical appeals for Isaac to accept his role at the head of the plantation.

“Old Carothers’ bold cramped hand […] made no effort either to explain or obfuscate the thousand-dollar legacy to the son of an unmarried slave-girl, to be paid only at the child’s coming of age, bearing the consequence of the act of which there was still not definite incontrovertible proof that he acknowledged, not out of his own substance but penalising his sons with it, […] not even a bribe for silence toward his own fame since his fame would only suffer after he was no longer present to defend it, flinging almost contemptuously, as he might a cast-off hat or pair of shoes, the thousand dollars which could have had no more reality to him under those conditions than it would have to the negro, the slave who would not even see it until he came of age, twenty-one years too late to begin to learn what money was.” 

Carothers McCaslin’s stated intention to provide an inheritance to his son by a slave whom he raped may appear admirable at first glance, but Isaac recognizes it for what it is: a final, hypocritical attempt to deflect guilt and defer the consequences of his actions. Isaac’s growing horror at the wrongs committed by his grandfather spurs him to take decisive action to distance himself from Carothers, such as seeking out and extending an inheritance to Eunice’s surviving descendants. In seeking an easy solution to past wrongs, however, he ironically ends up emulating his grandfather.

“Apparently they can learn nothing save through suffering, remember nothing save when underlined in blood.” 

After McCaslin presents the Civil War as evidence of God’s abandonment of the South, Isaac offers this contrasting view, in which it is the willful ignorance of the South that made the war inevitable. When gentler forms of persuasion failed, only war remained. Yet much of the story casts doubt on the extent to which those who survive the war really did learn anything. For instance, although Major de Spain exercises marginally less control over his Black servants than he did his slaves, his attitude toward them remains a condescending one.

“Courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to becomes truth, as far as we know truth.” 

McCaslin speaks these words to a young, impressionable Isaac, who is unsure of himself after failing to shoot Old Ben—or rather, failing to want to shoot Old Ben. They hint at the relationship between desires, values, and perception. Over time, he and Isaac hold to different values, which then become their own guiding truths and set them up to clash with one another.

“Yet this time it was as though the train […] had brought with it into the doomed wilderness even before the actual axe the shadow and portent of the new mill not even finished yet and the rails and ties which were not even laid; and he knew now […] why Major de Spain had not come back, and that after this time he himself, who had had to see it one time other, would return no more.” 

Isaac’s return to the Big Bottom after Old Ben’s death reveals a land on the cusp of change. His happiness at returning to the forest he loves is tainted by an awareness of the forest’s fragility and impending destruction. Like Major de Spain, he decides he would rather not return at all than return to a changed landscape. Isaac’s transition from naïve optimism to a growing sense of loss signifies his coming of age.

“He had not stopped, he had only paused, quitting the knoll which was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part […] and, being myriad, one.” 

Visiting the site where Sam and Lion are buried, Isaac refuses to consider them as dead. Instead, he sees them as part of a great whole that is paradoxically many and one. This seeming contradiction aligns with Isaac’s blueprint for human society based on the communal sharing of land and earth’s resources. Sam wishes for human society to be absorbed by or embedded in natural patterns, rather than vice versa.

“He put the other foot down at last and didn’t know it, standing with one hand raised as Sam had stood that afternoon six years ago when Sam led him into the wilderness and showed him and he ceased to be a child, speaking the old tongue which Sam had spoken that day without premeditation either: ‘Chief,’ he said. ‘Grandfather.’” 

From Sam, Isaac inherits cultural artifacts that are not his by birth, including beliefs and language. By echoing Sam’s actions, Isaac reveals that his mentorship with Sam came to a full and logical conclusion, despite Sam’s death. Isaac now stands to fill the role that Sam once filled—if he can find any land on which to fill it.