Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2015-05-28 18:07
Isaac (Ike) McCaslin became one of Faulkner's best-known protagonists in "The Bear." In this magazine version of "Delta Autumn," he is mainly identified simply as "McCaslin" (268), and several times as "Uncle Ike" (267, 275). The complex family history that Faulkner gives him in Go Down, Moses is barely hinted at here. The story refers to his "father" as a Confederate soldier (273), and to his "wife and children" (274), all now dead.
Submitted by johnmcorrigan@g... on Mon, 2015-05-25 14:22
John Keats, the author of the poem the boy's father reads him at the end of the story, was one of the principal figures of the second generation of British Romantics. Unlike the most prominent of his contemporaries, Keats was born of humble origins. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five, at which time he had only been a published poet for five years.
Submitted by johnmcorrigan@g... on Sun, 2015-05-24 15:16
This is the spot somewhere in the wilderness hunting ground in northwest Yoknapatawpha where in "The Bear" the boy hunter and Sam Fathers encounter the bear on a day in June, and the boy's little fyce dog actually bays the bear against "the trunk of a tree" (292). When this event is described again in Go Down, Moses, the boy is Ike McCaslin and the tree is a "big cypress" (200). In both cases the lesson the young hunter learns from Sam, the bear and the dog about "humility and pride" is the same (294, 281).
