Ike's Self-realization Experience In The Wilderness

William Faulkner undoubtedly ranks high on the list of the greatest and the most influential writers in world literary history. Best known for his Yoknapatawpha cycle, a great writer of the American South, Faulkner is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. His novel The Bear is widely anthologized and acclaimed as one of the best stories written in the 20th century. The Bear, one of Faulkner's"Wilderness Trilogy", a story about the central character Ike McCaslin's growing experience and his acquisition into the wilderness, reveals Faulkner's most intense, focused, and symbolic exploration of the relationship between man and nature. Set in the late nineteenth century,Composed of five sections, The Bear is told from Ike McCaslin's perspective in simple, straightforward language, which primarily portrays the adventure of an annual autumn hunting experience to pursuit of legendary bear Old Ben in the wilderness in mythical Yoknapatawpha County. With the development of the tale, Ike learns the code of wilderness under the guidance of an old and experienced hunter Sam Fathers. The Bear offers a heated exploration of themes about proprietary rights to the land, the cultural implications of miscegenation, incest, and maltreatment of African Americans, and the moral problems associated with pride, humility, and guilt, as well as the reconsideration about the land.The complicated meanings concealed in The Bear have been explored by a great many scholars at home and abroad, who have attached great attention to the southern mythical kingdom Yoknapatawpha, the relationship between the white and the black, the degeneration of the noble man and Faulkner's unique exercises of formal juxtaposition, multiple narrative angles, the stream of consciousness and other techniques.However, the author of this thesis differs from the traditional theme, linguistic style, structure and other writing techniques interpretation of The Bear, innovating to make a new understanding of the novel in viewpoint of ecological analysis. This essay intends to explore the relationship between human and land as well as civilization and wilderness in The Bear from the ecological perspective under the background of Deep Ecology, as proposed by Arne Naess so as to reveal Ike's Self-realization progress in the wilderness.