A question of the bear's mortality

Twice in the story The Bear, the titular character is described as being "absolved of mortality." (p.183, p.193) Yet, obviously, the bear is killed. So why described Old Ben as such, as being absolved of mortality, or not, it would seem, being subject to death? The bear runs in Ike's "knowledge before he ever saw it," and is "out of an old dead time." (193). He is not even a "mortal beast" but an anachronism--a thing from the past, a mystical thing living out of time. Old Ben is totally solitary, no other creature in this present shares his blood, he is a "widower childless." He is alone, misplaced in time, and cannot die--until he does. The forest, the bear's home, alien to him in time but not place is dying alongside him. Men gnaw at its edges, making it a "doomed wilderness" in the name of progress--so the wilderness also seems out of time in a society consumed with civilization and progress and trains and caging animals in zoos. Old Ben dies, but something of him doesn't, perhaps something of the wilderness shan't. When Boon kills the bear, what doesn't he kill? What part of him is absolved or mortality? He kills Old Ben, but perhaps cannot kill how striking the bear's anachronism was, cannot kill the dead time he was born of: the past itself. 

Comments

  1. Elena TalamanteApril 22, 2021 at 10:16 PM

    I had been associating Ike, the bear, and Sam as alter egos like we discussed in class. What you mentioned about the bear being from the past or living out of time makes me wonder what time Ike (and Sam) lives in. Is there a distant past that predates racism, and that is the time that Sam and Ike are still tied to? Or is it some other separation from time that allows Ike to repudiate his inheritance and care for his family’s genealogy on both sides of the color line? How does time help us understand Ike?

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  2. Ms. BucherApril 25, 2021 at 5:41 PM

    To be “absolved” is to be “set or declared (someone) free from blame, guilt, or responsibility,” so for Old Ben to be absolved of mortality is not to see him immortal, but to be given permission to die, to be blameless if he steps into death, even if he has the most cunning, intellectual, or intuitive gifts of life in his forest home. Ben is bigger than myth, but will be taken down by the man Sam who is smarter and craftier yet in an act that ushers in a future which may ultimately destroy the forest itself. Perhaps Sam wants to help Ben die before men who are cutting down the forest with industrialized methods destroy him by removing his known world.

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  3. Krishnan VenkateshMay 2, 2021 at 9:56 PM

    Great point about "absolved," Ms. Bucher. "Free to die," able to step out of all taints and entanglements, as if all the human confusion has nothing to do with him. I guess this is what makes Ben such a mythic figure, either in himself or in the eyes of Isaac who feels himself mired in the mud of history. Ben is Isaac's poignant fantasy of a freedom he doesn't have.

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