The Bear

Issues of ancestry, familial relationships, and generation gaps surface in several contexts. Following the deaths of his parents, Isaac finds a father figure in Sam, even as he considers the woods to be a mother of sorts. Sam teaches Isaac to use “Grandfather” as a term of respect for majestic creatures, even as Isaac grows to despise his own grandfather. Faulkner questions the significance of ancestry, both in the contrast between Sam’s noble strain of Chickasaw blood and Boon’s relatively “plebeian” variety and in the contrast between Isaac’s inheritance through the male McCaslin line, while McCaslin belongs to the female line. Some characters are described as not having any ancestors at all. When, as recorded in the ledgers, Lucas Beauchamp refuses his assigned name of Lucius, he severs himself from his ancestors, becoming “selfprogenitive” or “by himself ancestored” (268). Likewise, Old Ben is described as “so long unwifed and childless as to become its own ungendered progenitor” (199). Taken together, these various threads suggest that ancestry and familial connections can be a source of pride or shame, of connection or repulsion, of great import or little concern, even inherited or chosen. From the broader perspective adopted by Isaac in his concluding visit to the Big Bottom, such details fade into insignificance with the recognition that all of life and nature forms a single whole.