Big Bottom in "The Bear" (Location)

The wilderness is an area of old-growth forest south of the Tallahatchie River in the north-west part of Yoknapatawpha. In the opening of “The Bear,” Faulkner describes the site as “thirty miles” (290) of hunting ground within “an area almost a hundred miles deep” (281). In his depiction of this setting as a “doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows” (281-2), Faulkner presents a critique of the plantation and sharecropping systems.