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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Control

While there is a plethora of meanings in "The Bear," one seems especially important. Faulkner places an evident difference between the narrator's thoughts when living in nature and when observing man's creations. In this passage, he is experiencing nature:
The boy listened, to no ringing chorus strong and fast on a free scent but a moiling yapping an octave too high and with something more than indecision and even abjectness in it which he could not yet recognise, reluctant, not even moving very fast, taking a long time to pass out of hearing, leaving even then in the air that echo of thin and almost human hysteria, abject, no sense of a fleeing unseen smoke-colored shape.
(Chapter 1)
This is one long sentence. He uses this style quite often, but it definitely in stark contrast to the form used when addressing the human accounts and records in chapter 4. It is also an obvious difference when compared to the dialogue so often used between human characters. This parallels the issue of human control that Faulkner is driving at throughout the short story. Humans desire to cut down and dissect nature in order to control it.

Ad augusta per angusta,
Will Drake

P.S. Commented on Hunter's "William Faulkner's Sausage Festival!"

1 comment:

  1. I agree with you, we as imperfect human beings try to dissect things so as to control them and make them perfect to ourselves. Yet, I don't think we quite understand the perfection God has put before us in nature. Because we are imperfect,we make things imperfect even in the process of trying to make things perfect.

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