Unnamed People in Want

The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" identifies a group of men who, "since the last year years, cannot find work" (64). The chronological reference probably points to the Great Depression of the 1930s, an era defined by mass unemployment and what the story calls "men among us now whose families are in want" (64). Also according to the narrator, in an apparent contradiction to the rest of the passage, "these [men] all attain and hold to a "certain respectability" as salesmen of "minor articles like soap and men’s toilet accessories and kitchen objects," which they carry around town in black sample cases (64). (At first the narrator is surprised to see Lucius Provine with such a case, but within a week it is "discovered that it contained whisky in pint bottles," 64.)