The Bear

In the long section of the text devoted primarily to Isaac and McCaslin’s discussion of Isaac’s reasons for refusing his inheritance, Faulkner varies his use of capitalization and punctuation. Specifically, the first words in paragraphs of narration (not speech) are not capitalized, and the last words of these same paragraphs lack terminal punctuation. Many gaps from the ending of one such paragraph to the opening of the next make for jarring transitions, as when one paragraph ends “not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free” and the next begins, “himself and his cousin amid the old smells of cheese and salt meat” (242). Additionally, the narrative frequently veers off into tangents, including memories, which are not always relayed in chronological order. The effect of these choices is disorienting and risks robbing the material of cohesiveness.

As a deliberate and experimental choice by Faulkner, however, this style affords readers the unique sense that they are following Isaac’s thoughts and whims in real time, adding a sense of urgency and involvement in the passages where Isaac makes disturbing discoveries while investigating his family ledgers. Faulkner’s fluid syntax reaches a climax as Isaac’s recollection of his wife’s use of sexual enticement to urge him to reclaim his property slips between past and present, internal and external:

‘I can’t. Not ever. Remember:’ and still the steady and invincible hand and he said Yes and he thought, She is lost. She was born lost. We were all born lost then he stopped thinking and even saying Yes, it was like nothing he had ever dreamed, let alone heard in mere man-talking until after a no-time he returned and lay spent on the insatiate immemorial beach and again with a movement one time more older than man she turned and freed herself and on their wedding night she had cried and he thought she was crying now at first, into the tossed and wadded pillow, the voice coming from somewhere between the pillow and the cachinnation: ‘And that’s all. That’s all from me. If this don’t get you that son you talk about, it wont be mine’: lying on her side, her back to the empty rented room, laughing and laughing (Pages 299-00).

The section ends thus, without terminal punctuation, leaving readers with a clear sense of Isaac’s experience, rather than a mere transcription of events.

Informal dialect and creative, nonstandard grammar are hallmarks of Faulkner’s style. Following in the footsteps of contemporaries like E.E. Cummings, Faulkner developed his own orthography, abandoning grammatical and stylistic conventions in favor of his own that effectively communicated a sense of person and place inherent to his Southern Gothic writings. His nonstandard grammar in “The Bear” is therefore not only an effective literary device within the story, but indicative of Faulkner’s writing throughout his career.