Identity Crises are Ugly Things

While Faulkner is skilled at making interesting characters by means of developmental quirks/strangeness, (e.g. Sam Father’s mystique and forest-knowledge and Boon’s repulsiveness coupled with his strange obsession with Lion), a major problem within The Bear is identity and confusion regarding identity. Not only is the main character, “the boy,” only rarely called by name, the story, especially the fourth chapter, reveals a history of racial confusion, moral confusion, and economic confusion, fraught with people using each other and buying and selling things that are not vendible, specifically, land. Meanwhile, Faulkner uses the whole idea of the hunt for Old Ben to give identity to Ike (the boy) and the others as huntsmen...ironic, since they gain their identity through the destruction of a life, much as the McCaslin line of pioneers and slave-owners gained identity from lording over Native Americans and black people. In addition, Faulkner adds to the confusion structurally; not only are chapters one through three and chapter five often ambiguous, but the entire extent of chapter four is comprised of broken paragraphs, interrupted conversations, and hopelessly entwined historical accounts, with Faulkner making no clear efforts to establish speakers or the characters about whom they are speaking.