The Contrasting Themes and Structure of William Faulkner's The Bear
At first, William Faulkner's The Bear, seems to be a story about the decline of an old bear and the wilderness he represented. Oddly, it is possible to omit the fourth chapter of The Bear and still have a complete and less confusing story. Although sandwiched in between the third and fifth chapters, the fourth chapter is almost wholly independent. For the purpose of this analysis, I will refer to chapters one, two, three, and five as being one half of the story, while chapter four solely comprises the other half.
At first, it seems that these two sections have little in common, but that exactly is Faulkner's intention. He has deliberately pitted these two halves of the story against each other in order to compare and contrast wilderness to civilization. He does this by creating two separate and independent plots, containing each almost solely in the environment dictated by their theme, contrasting two martyr-like characters-each central to the plot, and giving the two sections different narrative styles and chronology. To complicate things, the fourth chapter is placed in the midst of the rest of the story.
Faulkner uses contrasting plots to separate the two sections of The Bear at the lowest possible level. The first half of the story (chapters 1,2,3, and 5) contains a fully contained plot about a bear hunt and the decline of the wilderness, while the other half (chapter 4) is also self sufficient in its plot, depending only on the other half for introducing the main characters. The first half of the story tells a bittersweet tale of a boy
who wished to learn humility and pride in order to become skillful and worthy in the woods but...
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...the wilderness, but abandoned it along with the wilderness. Faulkner illustrates these differences with representative parts in the story and communicates his feelings towards each in what he chooses to write and how he writes it. Yet by melding the two parts into one and tying them inseparably together, he effectively communicates the duality of grief felt by the boy, one of that last who understood humility and pride.
Works Cited
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
Evans, David H. "Taking the Place of Nature: 'The Bear' and the Incarnation of America." Faulkner and the Natural World: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1996. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.
Faulkner, William. “The Bear.” Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. Vintage: 1997.
16. James Hinkle and Robert McCoy, Reading Faulkner: The Unvanquished. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 141.
we come today to a "Big Brother" is the mob. The people are also controlled by
While there is validity in reading her strong heroines as reactions towards her sexual assault, it is important to recognize Gentileschi was part of a far more nuanced dialogue about the position of the artist as well as women in the Baroque era. Her life is often fictionalized and sensationalized, further feminizing her and created a greater void between her and her male counterparts. While...
The Party. They are taken to a prison unlike any other. Winston is constantly tortured and beaten, until he confesses to crimes
Porter, Carolyn. "William Faulkner: Innocence Historicized." Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. Cited as rpt. in Bloom.
In his novel, “1984,” George Orwell warns us against three things. He stated that people are only out for personal gain, and will use any means to reach their goals. He also warned against these types of people who are already in power. And lastly, he warns us against the lost of privacy through constant surveillance, and how we actually allow this to happen.
1984 is about a parallel world 35 years into the future, in which all nations have been combined into three major countries: Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia. London still exists, but it is now a part of Oceania, governed by an entity called the Party, headed by a dominant figure called “Big Brother”. The Party's one goal is power; power over everybody and everything in Oceania. There is constant surveillance; devices called telescreens are put in people's homes to monitor thoughts, actions and broadcast Party propaganda continuously, with no way for the person to turn it off or change the channel. Free thinkers are not tolerated, and the "Thought Police" are sent to capture the culprits. The Party is developing an official language called “Newspeak,” whose goal is to simplify language by eliminating as many "extra" words as possible and reducing vocabulary to a small number of basic words, thus narrowing the range of thought.
1984 is a powerful work of George Orwell, but one of the key components to the book is the dream of Winston and how that dream relates to the book overall. Winston dreams of the deaths of his mother and sister. They were sinking in water, sacrificing their lives in some tragic, loving way to keep Winston alive. The dream then changes to the "Golden Country," an idyllic setting. A girl runs towards him, carelessly tearing off her clothes in defiance of the Party. Winston wakens with "Shakespeare" upon his lips.
"William Faulkner (1897-1962)." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 97. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007. 1-3. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. Hempfield High School. 31 March 2010.
Throughout the story, "Killing the Bear," the reader is given a number of side notes about bears and the woman's experience with them.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury: The Corrected Text with Faulkner's Appendix. Norton, 1994.
The Invasion of Privacy is also used to control people. Devices called Telescreens are setup everywhere for the use of your entertainment and the party’s. They are objects that not only allow you to watch them and hear them like a television but in return you yourself are watched and heard by the party. Other ways in which privacy is taken away is by the use of little sound devices called “Bugs.'; In one scene Winston and Julia are talking and Julia says, “I bet that picture’s got bugs behind it'; (Orwell 122)1. When she says this she is implying that the party is listening to everything they say and do. The final way the party invades privacy is by The Thought Police. The Thought Police are members of the party that control life through the telescreens and bugs. When you are caught by them for a crime you must then go to prison for as long as it takes to purify or make you sane enough to work for the party once again.
George Orwell is considered to be one of the most creative and expressive political writers of the twentieth century, particularly for his views opposing communism and totalitarian regimes famously expressed in his novel, 1984. Orwell perceived communism as, “A new, dangerous form of totalitarianism, a powerful tool for controlling the masses.” Orwell’s hatred towards communism began with communist leader, Joseph Stalin whom he referred to as, “a bloody-minded master” (Rossi 1). Orwell’s views solidified during his participation in the Spanish Civil War; throughout his experience, Orwell was subject to communist propaganda, which led to his distrust of authority and established hatred of fascist and communist governments (Rossi 2). Orwell’s views, along with his participation ...
By reading closely and paying attention to details, I was able to get so much more out of this story than I did from the first reading. In short, this assignment has greatly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the more complex and subtle techniques Faulkner used to communicated his ideas in the story.
To discover how Nutella came to be, we have to go back 13.83 billion years to the Big Bang. It all started with the theory that an explosion of an extremely dense singularity, created the raw material for everything (6). This theory is based on logic, but there is more evidence to support this theory every day. After the Big Bang, the universe was rapidly expanding with time as matter and energy began to separate (6). However, matter was only composed of protons and neutrons in this stage of the game. When temperatures fell low enough, protons were able to link up with electrons to form atoms such as hydrogen and helium (4). From dying stars we received other atoms of higher mass, such as carbon and oxygen, from the fusion of atoms in high temperatures. Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen provide the basic molecular structure for hazelnuts, but where would they grow?