In the portion of the review excerpted below, Lehan, an assistant professor at UCLA, interprets "The Bear" in much the same way as a poem would be analyzed. He also focuses on the relationships between several characters, especially Lion and Boon, Sam Fathers and the bear.

Faulkner's "The Bear," published in The Saturday Evening Post and in Go Down, Moses, has received its share of critical explication, and the pattern and meaning of the novel seems to have been thoroughly discussed. Certainly there is much that can be taken for granted: the bear is a symbol of nature, its death symbolizes the loss of the wilderness and all the wilderness represents, and the wilderness seems to represent a kind of Emersonian realm where man and nature are spiritually and emotionally at one, an Edenic world before the Fall where time does not exist and where, like Keats'...