William Faulkner's The Bear

The balance between nature and “progress” plays out with dramatic tension in William Faulkner’s short story, “The Bear.” Progress will be our downfall, Faulkner seems to suggest through this complex tale of a boy’s evolving understanding of nature, experienced through the annual ritual of a hunting expedition in pursuit of an imposing and elusive bear, Old Ben. As we destroy the wilderness, the story tells us, we lose ourselves. Heavy on symbolism and characterized by numerous sub-themes that weave throughout the story, “The Bear” conveys the central notion of humankind’s frailty and impotence against the forces of nature, despite our pride in the steps we have taken toward harnessing the wilderness for our own purposes in the name of progress.
Go too far in exploiting the wild, and the result will ruin you, Faulkner warns. A richly worded passage from early in the story hints at the author’s point of view on man versus wild:
The doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, through which ran not even a mortal animal but an anachronism, indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life at which the puny humans swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant: the old bear solitary, indomitable and alone, widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality” (68).

Faulkner’s use of descriptive phrases like “punily gnawed at” and “like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant” to describe man’s actions in the wilderness, compared to the words he chooses to describe the bear, “solitary, indomitable and alone, widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality” neatly reveals his disdain for mankind and reverence for the wild. In this description, man is an annoyance, insignificant, fearful, and relentlessly determined to hack pitifully away at the natural order, and the bear has no option other than stoic resistance. No matter how heavily mankind equips itself to contend with nature, man is feeble against its indomitable force. Regardless, human beings doggedly engage time and time again in the battle for dominion over the natural world. Hunting is one way in which mankind attempts to control the environment, but, Faulkner suggests, the news is not all bad. In the microcosm of “The Bear,” Old Ben is the very embodiment of nature, while the boy represents mankind as a whole. John Lydenberg eludes to this observation in his article, “Nature Myth in Faulkner’s ‘The Bear,’” suggesting that the wilderness — the bear — is something that men need, both as an escape and as a means of proving their power:
In attempting to kill Old Ben, the men are contending with the wilderness itself. In one sense, as men, they have a perfect right to do this, as long as they act with dignity and propriety, maintaining their humility while they demonstrate the ability of human beings to master the brute forces of nature…. In their rapport with nature and their contest with Old Ben, they regain the purity they have lost in their workaday world, and abjure the petty conventions with which they ordinarily mar their lives (64).

As Lydenberg notes, Faulkner conveys the complexity of the human-nature relationship. While on one level the men are compelled to “master,” dominate, and destroy it, on another level it provides them with “purity” that progress has eliminated from their lives. In his depiction of the boy, however, — the embodiment of humankind — Faulkner offers readers a thread of hope. Leaving his gun behind but initially aided by a compass and a watch, the boy sets out alone one morning to track the bear himself. His decision to pursue Old Ben without the protection of a gun indicates the boy’s innate understanding of the ancient laws of nature that pre-date the development of weapons for man. “He had left the gun; of his own will and relinquishment he had accepted not a gambit, not a choice, but a condition in which not only the bear’s heretofore invaluable anonymity but all the old rules and balances of hunter and hunted had been abrogated” (74). As he progresses through the woods, even his compass, watch, and stick seem to the boy to be intolerable accessories, barriers between himself and the bear, so he leaves them behind. “It was the watch, the compass, the stick — the three lifeless mechanicals with which for nine hours he had fended the wilderness off; he hung the watch and compass carefully on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and relinquished completely to it” (75). The boy proceeds to lose his way in the woods, failing to find his way back despite calling upon the strategies he had been taught by his mentors over the years. In “Faulkner’s Poetic Prose: Style and Meaning in The Bear,” Richard Lehan observes that it is the boy’s shedding of manmade mechanicals that enables him to see the bear at last, and it is seeing the bear that allows him, once again, to find his way:
[The boy], in fact, has to divest himself of watch and compass before he can see the bear, because the man-made instruments impose a mechanical and unnatural order upon nature; and Ike sees the bear at the same spot where he left the watch and compass, as if time and space begin with the bear because he encompassed both (244). The roles of hunter and hunted are reversed in this scene. Clearly, unbeknownst to him, the boy was being stalked by the bear even as he believed that he, himself, was the hunter. Faulkner urges the reader to question what we actually gain by turning the trappings of progress against nature and exploiting it, in light of what we stand to lose given the ultimate power of the wild. At the time of the boy’s next encounter with the bear, he has a small dog with him, a “fyce” described as “a little dog, nameless and mongrel and many-fathered, grown, yet weighing less than six pounds” (80).
The dog is a bundle of untamed energy, a force of nature that acts on sheer impulse without fear of consequences. Upon spotting the bear, the fyce excitedly runs directly at it, apparently undeterred by the bear’s imposing stature or likely response to its noisy attacker. Alarmed by the dog’s reaction and fearing for the animal’s life, the boy stifles any fear and chases it, capturing the dog only once he is close enough to the bear to be able to see a tick on the inside of its leg. Significantly, the boy does not use his gun to eliminate the threat when he had the, but puts himself in the middle of the action instead. In an article entitled, “The Hero in the New World: William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear,’” R.W.B. Lewis makes note of this choice: “[The boy] has two occasions on which he might use his rifle against Old Ben: the first time, he abandons it in order to present himself in evident humility to the bear; the second time, he throws it away and risks his life in the charitable act of rescuing the little fyce” (658). Both times, the boy could have killed the bear. Both times, the bear also could have killed the boy. Faulkner upholds the truce between the bear, symbolizing wilderness, and the boy, representing mankind, when the trappings of progress are put aside favor of an authentic experience in
nature. The idea that unchecked progress threatens mankind as surely as it threatens the wilderness appears as a prominent theme in Faulkner’s “The Bear.” The protagonists in the story are at their strongest and most noble when each holds back its own most deadly weapon against the other in favor of mutual respect and coexistence. Human beings cannot defeat nature, Faulkner suggests, but we can save ourselves by setting aside our reliance on the accoutrements of progress and simply coexisting in peace.