'Let Me Talk Now': Chronotopes and Discourse in 'The Bear'

This essay explores ethical and religious dimensions of William Faulkner’s 'The Bear' from a Bakhtinian perspective. It identifies the chronotopes which provide the narrative ground for the representation of Ike’s experiences, actions, and ideas and analyzes how, during the various phases of his story, each chronotope generates different conceptions of individual identity, social interaction, the processes of history, ethics, and morality. Another main focus is the various discourses – hegemonic and marginalized, socioeconomic and religious – which help shape Ike’s worldview and his individual consciousness. These discourses provide a fundamental key for understanding his responses while reading the McCaslin commissary ledgers and his subsequent decision to repudiate his legacy. The meandering form, complex reasoning, intense emotional quality, and increasingly religious tone of the long conversation between Ike and Cass are examined in light of confessional self-accounting.