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2.3 Sam Fathers and Boon Hogganbeck
As a son of nature, Sam Fathers can be regarded as the embodiment of wilderness virtues. His confidence, courage, indifference to wealth and fame as well as his harmony with nature all illustrate that he is the noble savage praised by Rousseau. Besides, William Van O’Connor also comments on him in his book, “Sam Fathers, son of a Chickasaw chief and a Negro slave, understands the wilderness and teaches its lessons to Isaac (Ike) McCasIin. Ike learns endurance, humility, and courage from Sam Fathers.”(146)
Sam is very familiar with everything of the wilderness, he not only teaches Ike a lot of hunting skills but also many traditional virtues, such as humility, endurance, courage, and so on. In his whole life, he is strict with himself to follow the law of nature and is indifferent to all enjoyment which nature has bestowed upon him. What’s more, he is never affected by the greed and desire of human society. Faulkner has described this point in the beginning of the story, “Only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible” (185).
Meanwhile, he is very an important man in Ike’s path of spiritual growth, He teaches Ike to respect nature, to know the mysteries of nature, and to learn the law of nature, which has a great impact upon shaping Ike’s character and promoting his moral maturity. Finally, Ike becomes a person with many primitive virtues such as mercy, humility, brave, pride, patience, and so on. However, like Old Ben, Sam is also considered as a part of the survival chain to experience existence, death and rebirth. He lies motionless in the wet land where people have stepped. Old Ben dies, and Sam has no sense to live in this world, because he is the son of nature. Faulkner arranges the ending of Sam’s death in this novel, which plays funeral march for the forest and nature that are destroyed ruthlessly by the so-called highly civilized society.
In addition to Sam, Boon is another important figure in The Bear .He is brave and loyal without professions and skills. He has two obvious characteristics: one is that he is addicted to drunkenness, while the other is that he is very loyal to Major deSpain. Although he has been affected by the industrial civilization, there is still a part of his blood which is same as Sam’s blood and it is also shown well in the novel, “He was four inches over six feet; he had the mind of a child, the heart of a horse, and little bard shoe-button eyes without depth or meanness or generosity or viciousness or gentleness or anything else, in the ugliest face the boy had ever seen.”(219-220)
Boon is a simple man, he is very pure and his thought is never processed by the civilization, and he is angry when others tease him. Boon likes Lion very much, Lion also likes to stay with Boon. They can live in harmony, because both of them have wilderness property in common. In the fierce struggle between Lion and Old Ben, Boon as a hunter, his fatal knife makes Old Ben dead, which should have made him excited, instead, he is disordered, because he has killed the son of nature and feels guilty in his inner heart. In a word, Sam and Boon belong to wilderness; they live in the forest in a primitive way. As hunters, they have to kill Old Ben, but on the other hand, after the death of Old Ben, their tragic endings are inevitable. Faulkner writes it in this way in order to illustrate that human beings will be punished if they destroy nature.