A Politically Unconscious Reading Of William Faulkner’s The Bear

William Faulkner,a classic American Southern writer of the last century and a master of the modernist stream of consciousness,The Bear,published in 1942,is a very important work of Faulkner’s.With its broad thematic implications and in-depth analysis of social issues such as the destruction of pristine ecology and the persecution of different races,the novel can be said to be a manifesto of Faulkner’s creative work.This thesis presents a specific textual analysis of The Bear by reading the original work,translations,combined with supporting materials such as the author’s personal biography,and summarising the relevant literature to decipher the political unconsciousness of the work.The political unconsciousness exists in all literature,hidden in the gaps,fissures and silences in the structure of the text,the places where the literary work wants to speak but does not.The political unconsciousness is the repression of the deep unconscious of people in real relationships,and what is repressed is precisely the utopian desire that the author uses the text as a utopian space to release his political desires.The thesis is divided into six chapters.The first introductory chapter begins with an account of the theory of the political unconsciousness and its influence on domestic and international intellectual research;it introduces the life of the author Faulkner and the figures that have influenced him,outlines the basic content of The Bear and summarises the results of domestic and international research on The Bear.The second chapter uses ecological ethics as an entry point for an analysis of the symbolic depiction of wilderness nature and industrial capital.The extensive agricultural economic model of the American South and his personal experience of the woods had a great influence on Faulkner’s writing on nature,and as a result he became extremely disgusted with the foreign invasion of northern industrial capital,and his inner resistance was repressed in his heart.The third chapter reflects on the two triggers of racial conflict namely private ownership of land and the exploitation of blacks,who were persecuted as racism intensified due to the prevalence of Puritanism in the South,and Faulkner maps his compassion for the blacks and his criticism of slavery onto the text to show his inner political unconsciousness.The fourth chapter starts from the Protagonist’s growth.Through Isaac Mc Caslin’s baptism in the wilderness and his inner conflict in the face of the reality of the family scandal,and finally reflecting on himself and making the choice to give up his property,Faulkner shows his personal political desires through the character’s growth under the collision of modernism and Southern tradition so as to release Faulkner’s suppressed inner political unconsciousness.Chapter five shows from the analysis of the above-mentioned perspectives that the utopian world within Faulkner is one that wants to awaken the natural consciousness of mankind and rebuild social morality.The first step in building an ideal society is to rebuild the social morality that humans can believe in and practise.The concluding section of Chapter Six explains the unique aesthetic value of The Bear in today’s natural and social environment of the world and the limitations of this thesis.