The themes of wilderness and the white man in William Faulkner's The BearWilliam Faulkner's The Bear is two-sided in subject and plot. The first half of the story examines wild nature and the virtues man can learn from it. The second half applies these virtues to civilization, exposing the white man's corruption and abuse of the land. A careful look at the interaction of these two halves reveals a single unifying theme: man must learn virtue from nature. Faulkner believed that humility, pride, courage, and freedom would be nearly impossible for man to learn without the wilderness to teach him. The first half of the story tells the bittersweet story of a boy who wanted to learn humility and pride to become skilled. and worthy in the woods but found himself becoming so skilled so quickly that he feared he would never become worthy because he hadn't learned humility and pride no matter how hard he tried, until one day an old man who couldn't define any of the two led him as if by the hand where an old bear and a little mongrel dog showed him that, possessing the other thing, he would possess them both. (283)The "old man" is Sam Fathers, "son of a negro slave and an Indian king." Although he "could not have defined either pride or humility," he nevertheless understood them through his Indian and Negro heritage. The boy is Isaac, or Ike, McCaslin, the protagonist who learns virtue from the wild and repudiates his grandfather's corrupt legacy. The passage above describes the high point of the first half of the story in which Ike saves his little dog from the crush of the imposing bear. Ike is so close to the bear that he can see "that there [is] a big tick right on the inside of his back paw." This act gives ... middle of the card ... that he once had pride and humility in the desert, but abandoned it along with the desert. Faulkner illustrates these differences with the story's two contrasting themes. However, by fusing the two parts into one and binding them together inseparably, he effectively communicates the duality of the pain felt by the boy. Isaac loses the wilderness he so loved and respected and, in doing so, the legacy he might otherwise have had. Works Cited Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Evans, David H. "Taking Nature's Place: 'The Bear' and the Embodiment of America." Faulkner and the Natural World: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1996. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. Faulkner, William. "The Bear." Uncollected Stories by William Faulkner. Vintage: 1997.