27 pages • 54 minutes read
William FaulknerA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document:—of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it. Of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey.”
This quote from the story’s second paragraph sets the tone for what follows: an indictment of the human tendency to claim ownership of natural things. Here, neither Indigenous peoples nor European settlers are blameless, as both participate in the farce of buying and selling land. Faulkner characterizes the pieces of land for sale as just that—fragments of a larger whole that neither can nor should be divided.
“He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area almost a hundred miles square had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man.”
The McCaslin family plantation is not Isaac’s only inheritance. He also inherits, almost instinctively, a relationship with Old Ben and the territory he dominates. Though he does not gain ownership or money from this latter inheritance, he comes to prefer it to his familial inheritance for reasons he has a difficult time articulating to McCaslin.
“That doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes […], and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant.”
Here, Faulkner characterizes the destruction of the wilderness not as one or more dramatic events, but rather as a slow accumulation of small annoyances. Though the people in this scenario are clearly outmatched by the wilderness and the bear who prowls it in terms of strength, grandeur, nobility, and longevity, the wilderness is “doomed” to lose because of the relentless, incessant nature of the assault.
By William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom
William Faulkner
A Fable
William Faulkner
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
Barn Burning
William Faulkner
Dry September
William Faulkner
Go Down, Moses
William Faulkner
Intruder In The Dust
William Faulkner
Light in August
William Faulkner
Sanctuary
William Faulkner
Spotted Horses
William Faulkner
That Evening Sun
William Faulkner
The Hamlet
William Faulkner
The Reivers
William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Unvanquished
William Faulkner
American Literature
View Collection
Animals in Literature
View Collection
Books on Justice & Injustice
View Collection
Books on U.S. History
View Collection
Civil Rights & Jim Crow
View Collection
Coming-of-Age Journeys
View Collection
Earth Day
View Collection
Science & Nature
View Collection
Southern Gothic
View Collection