William Faulkners The Bear and Barn Burning: A Comparison

However we meat Boon in the beginning of the story and slowly through out the story we learn that Boon is not perfect and that he is related to Sam Fathers, who is Ike’s teacher. Ike like all main characters show some prevalence over the thing, which holds him back, the woods. Ike slowly becomes a great woodsmen and tracker. Boon is still a man verging on hunter but not one because he doesn’t have the ability to be patient and non-violent when he kills. Ike runs into the indestructible bear Old Ben two times in his growth towards manhood but never with the intention to kill him.

She is a decoy for the wolf pack, remarks Henry, luring the sled dogs away as food for the pack. After much discussion, the men decide it would be prudent to use some of the remaining ammunition to take care of the troublesome she-wolf. Left with only three dogs, the men start out the next morning only to meet more catastrophe as the sled overturns on a bad price of trail. Stuck between a tree trunk and a large rock, the men are forced to unleash the dogs to straighten the sled.

On the other hand, the men had several differences. In two of the stories, Into The Wild and Grizzly Man, the main character perishes as a result of his choice to live this way, while in Walden, Thoreau survives all the way through his experience. However, the most prominent differences between the characters were their reasons for venturing into the wild in the first place. Henry David Thoreau went into the woods “because [he] wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could learn what it had to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived” (Thoreau, Chapter II). His goal was to live his life simply yet richly in the wilderness.

The wolf-dog in the story studies the situation and knows that traveling is not a good idea. The wolf-dog stays with the miner until his death. Once the miner dies, the wolf-dog finishes his journey by heading off to the miners’ camp on his own. The most argued point of this short story is the reason for the protagonist’s death. Even though the miner in “To Build a Fire” eventually panics after being unable to start a fire, he struggles in the wilderness of the Yukon Territory and ultimately finds his death due to ignorance caused by a lack intuition and imagination.

Later in the story, when John is being shot at by the army the horse finds a way to make those shots hit him instead of John and separates from John in death, symbolizes that John will have to leave the Indians, to protect them. In When the Legends Die the Bear cub who grows up with bears brother is a symbol, of hope, love, meaning, direction, and most importantly the heritage of Tom Black Bull. The bear symbolizes the Tom’s heritage because he came around just as Tom, started learning the old ways, his heritage, and he was separated from Tom when he, Tom, went to the new ways of life. In the new ways of life Tom’s difficulty is that he cannot find a place to run from his past. Then, he realizes that bear symbolizes his past, so Tom sets out to kill it.

The animals then gather in the barn where a boar, Old Major, delivers a speech to his fellow animals about a dream he has that one day all animals will be free from the tyranny of man and in perfect comradeship. Two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball plot to drive Mr. Jones off the farm. They along with the other barnyard animals succeed but the bigger conflict is revealed, when Snowball and Napoleon struggle over the power distribution. Over the years, Napoleon and Snowball engage in many disputes regarding the management of a successful farm. Snowball establishes committees to educate the other farm animals while Napoleon takes no interest, he thought training the young should take priority over an adult animal’s education.

Ed proves he is hunting for pride and for the respect of his friends when he says, "I might as well make some show of doing what I said I had come for" and " All I had really wanted was to stay away a reasonable length of time, long enough for the others to wake and find me gone […]. That would satisfy honor" (95). Ed is a city boy dissatisfied with work and love and to compensate he goes on this trip against his better judgment. The four suburbanites have no business being in the forest, the only one that has made a habit of hunting is Ed's friend Lewis.

All the stories he heard were to help him when his time came to face the bear. When the boy had his first chance to go out on a hunting trip with the men the first thing Sam told him was “Be scared, you cant help that, but don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”(793) At the age of ten he was ready to shoot the bear, and yet he never had the chance to see it, because the bear knew the boy was a coward at the time and the bear knew he would shoot him because the boy did not yet respect him as the more experienced hunters did. The boy felt the bear and this taught him even more than he already knew about it from the stories he had been told.

He can't comprehend why his father is so set in his ways and Kevin doesn’t want to live his father's life. Gary is a forester and finds it important to work hard to most provide for his family and to conserve nature. Kevin, like most kids, doesn’t understand his fathers way of thinking, and wants to live his own life. A life away from Lost Lake. Kevin attempts to break free of his fathers lifestyle by attending a nearby college, in hopes to eventually become teacher.

For a while he is convinced that he is a worker, but when he goes into the forest during the winter, he realizes that he is a bear and it is time for him to hibernate. In conclusion, society identifies the bear as a worker and the bear loses his identity of being a bear when he enters it.