Warning: There will be spoilers.
Andrew Krivak’s 2020 novel, The Bear, reminds me a great deal of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, almost as if the former is just a PG-13 version of the latter. The parallels between the two are many. They both involve an adult protagonist with his child adventuring through a post-apocalyptic setting. None of the characters in either book have names. In The Road the protagonists are Papa and boy and in The Bear the protagonists are Father and girl. Each story has its protagonists carry the hope and virtues of human civilization with them, passed down from generation to generation. In The Road these virtues are symbolized as “carrying the fire,” while in The Bear these virtues are symbolized as a collection of history’s greatest philosophers and poets. The boy even talks to his father after his death in the same way that the girl talks to her father after his death.
Stylistically, both stories eschew complex sentences and punctuation (such as quotation marks) to create a sparse writing style as lean as the world and characters in the story itself. Honestly, as I sit here and identify all the commonalities between the took books, it gets harder and harder to think that Krivak didn’t just decide the ripoff The Road by writing a story just legally distinct enough that he couldn’t be sued for intellectual property infringement. The only plot and stylistic in The Bear that is significantly different is the actual titular bear and even then it serves the same plot purpose as the group of people the boy meets after his father dies. But there is one major difference between both stories.
The Bear is an evil story while The Road is a virtuous story of human goodness. I know that may sound odd to some. After all, The Road is full of despair, violence, and cannibalism! But The Road is ultimately about the love between a father and son and the inner goodness of humanity that needs to be preserved and spread once more. It is a message of hope, declaring that even at its worst there is still something in people that is good and noble and worthy of preservation and spreading. The Bear is the exact opposite. It is nothing more than anti-human propaganda that is hateful of human existence itself. Its message is that humans are terrible, that all we do is destroy, that our civilization is a cancer, and that the world would be better if we did not exist.
And this horrific message is unsurprisingly being promoted by the U.S, government.
Don’t get me wrong, with its Spartan style and straight-forward prose, The Bear is well written propaganda. But it is propaganda nonetheless. The story (and morals) of The Bear very specifically says that the destruction of humans and human existence is a moral good and that if we have any hope of surviving until tomorrow we need to renounce the very philosophies and ideals that human civilization has been founded upon. According to The Bear, in order to save ourselves we must destroy our history, our identity, our sense of self altogether. That the books is fiction makes it seemingly harmless to most people. That is what makes it such an ideal vector through which to inculcate people who have their intellectual defenses down with the beliefs of the anti-natalist, anti-human “environmentalists” who see having children as evil and the extinction of humanity as a positive good for the Earth.
This article will expose just how The Bear uses its story to subtly indoctrinate people into these anti-human ideas, why they are bad, and why no one should read this book.
Denouncing Human Civilization
The book opens up with a father and his daughter, living in a simplistic home, one a what is repeatedly referred to as a mountain all on its own inspired by the mountains and forests around Mount Monadnock in southern New Hampshire. It has been generations since the events that caused the collapse of civilization and extermination of the human race except for these last two people. The girl’s mother dies from unexplained complications related to childbirth and the girl is raised alone by her father. They have two remnants of human civilization that have been passed down for generations- panes of glass and a collection of books passed down from father to son until this last father and his daughter. Everything else has been destroyed, though how is never made very clear.
It is not only from these books that father teaches the girl to read and write, it is to read these books that he teaches her to read and write. We know this because there is literally nothing else to read and no other reason to learn to read other than to read these books. That signals to us, the readers, that these books then reveal something about the story. So, what are these important and insightful books? The Bear tells us that the father, “read poetry from poets with strange names like Homer and Virgil, Hilda Doolittle, and Wendell Berry, poems about gods and men and the wars between them,” and stories, “about a house in the woods, a hunter and a mermaid, and rabbits in search of a home.” (pg. 32) While this doesn’t reveal to us any specific titles, we can figure out a few from the hints given.
Homer is the Greek poet and author of The Iliad and it’s sequel The Odyssey, so it is likely that the father had one or both of these books. Virgil is the Roman poet who wrote the epic poem The Aeneid, designed to be a sequel to The Iliad that saw refugees from the fall of Troy found Rome. Hilda Doolittle was an American poet known for her “succinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline” that created “an exact visual image made a total poetic statement,” an obvious inspiration on the writing of The Bear whose prose could be described similarly. Doolittle also wrote a sequel to The Iliad. Titled Helen in Egypt, it is a “feminist…critique of masculine readings of history,” as told through debates between Helen of Troy and the male heroes of The Iliad. Wendell Berry is an American poet and essayist whose poetry praises family-based household agrarianism, rails against modern urban life as evil, and calls for people to return to a a form of living based on rejecting modern industrialization.
The other books referenced are never given a title, but their descriptions give solid possibilities given the context of the story. The “house in the woods,” seems likely to be Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her life as a young girl growing up in a log cabin in the forests of Wisconsin. Pa plays as big a role in young Laura’s life as the Father plays in the girl’s life. The reference to “a hunter and a mermaid,” is almost certainly about The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell as Krivak cited it as a major inspiration for his novel. In The Animal Family, a hunter, a mermaid, a bear, and a lynx all form a family together, not unlike the way that the girl, the bear, and the puma relate to each other in The Bear. The “rabbits in search of a home,” could be a number of books, but I think it is most likely Home For A Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. If you imagine the girl in place of the bunny, the two stories more than resemble one another.
This is a varied bookshelf, to be sure. Homer’s works are considered some of the greatest in human history, lasting thousands of years because they speak so much to what makes us human. Similarly, Virgil’s Aeneid. But it seems that the ultimate purpose of naming these texts is to undermine them from the very start. Doolittle’s Helen in Egypt, undertakes “the revisioning of a key Homeric figure [Helen] and hence of Homeric epic itself,” with the purpose of marginalizing the masculinity of Homer’s works and replacing it with a “story of femininity” and “a feminised imagery of nature.” Where Homer (and Virgil) write for the glories of masculine Greece and Rome, Doolittle writes for the glories of Egypt, which she presents as “feminised and maternalised, and as expressive of an earlier phase in human history of goddess-worship.”
There is one conspicuous absence in all these books, the Bible. As the most printed book in all of history, surely it is more likely that a copy of it survived instead of The Animal Family or even The Iliad. But that absence is likely intentional. While there is no explicit religion in The Bear, there is a spirituality presented in the book – a form of pagan animism in which everything in nature is secretly sentient, with a mind and will of its own that humanity destroys through the process of civilization. The goal of the book, to make the final end of all human life sound beautiful and to establish Nature as superior to human individuality, is in direct contrast to God’s desire for Man to have dominion over the Earth (Genesis 1:26) and His command to Adam and Eve to multiply and fill the Earth with human life (Gen. 1:28). So, despite being a treasury of history’s most ancient, treasured, and beautiful poetry, it is no surprise that the Bible was left off of the father’s shelf.
Combining all these elements together and from the very beginning of his book, Krivak is telling us what he plans to do. It is a rejection of a patriarchal human society dominated by men (who have destroyed the world) and who seek to tame Nature. Instead, the book exults a kind of pagan divine femininity that is centered on Nature and the symbolism of the Fertility Goddess while promoting a rejection of human civilization as inevitably self-destructive and ultimately inconsequential. This symbolism then manifests itself in numerous ways all throughout the second half of the story.
Neo-Pagan Hate
First, when her father dies the girl cremates him. As his body burns, she impulsively throws the bow and quiver set that he both made for her and taught her to use onto the funeral pyre to burn with the father. In story, she explains that she did so because she feels unworthy of it after failing to use it to save him from the animal attack that left him diseased and which ultimately killed him. (Bear, pgs. 102, 127) But the symbolism to the reader is quite different. Human made weapons to hunt and kill animals represents the human drive to conquer nature and master its dangers. At first she fails in this effort and ends up having to make an inferior bow and arrows in order to survive the Winter. (pg. 165) But, this failure is triumphed over in the end when she returns home and abandons the use of all human tools, including her bow, and survives for decades.
Secondly, the girl begins communicating with nature through a mysterious language that all animals know. Humans used to know it, but they forgot it. (pg. 121) This, of course, represents the final break between primeval man and the natural world. It was only after the destruction of civilization that allowed the father and the girl to learn how to speak this lost language again. These story elements suggest that through civilization humans actually became unnatural and the only way this process could be reversed was by reversing the development of civilization. Of course, the utter destruction of civilization would hurry such a process along, allowing it to happen more quickly.
This section also contains another element of the feminist pagan Nature Goddess. The titular bear leading the girl back home explains that not only do animals have the ability to talk, but every living thing can speak. Including plants. In a revelation that is certainly meant to be Tolkienesque, the bear reveals that the trees are the “true and great keepers of the forest” (pg. 122) which taught all the animals to speak and which carry the memories of every living creature ever. (pg. 124) Further, the trees always speak slowly and methodically, such that it would “take the girl several moons to hear one of their [the trees’s] conversations, the better part of one [moon] just to hear a single word.” (pgs. 123-124) You know, just like ents. The girl then goes away to commune with the trees, or at least to hear what she can of what they say in so short a time.
As a side note, it is here that one of the significant themes from Homer and Virgil makes its way into the book. In ancient Greece, immortality “lay in the continued remembrance of the dead by the living.” This is actually a major theme in The Iliad when Achilles raises the funeral mound of his dead friend Patroclus, an echo of which we see in the book with the funeral mounds of the mother, the father, and the girl on the mountain. Similarly, in ancient Rome, “the only way to gain immortality was by being remembered in the minds of the living.” Likewise, in The Bear we read that the girl is repeatedly concerned about being remembered. She first mentions this when discussing the voice of the trees with the bear. The bear explains that the trees have memories which stretch back before the development of animal life and consoles the girl that here and her father will be remembered by the trees. (pgs. 124-125).
Later, the bear consoles the girl that as long as she remembers her father and her mother then they will be alive within her and everything she does every day. The bear also tells her that humans have only ever known loss but that their loss (and hers) will mean little when she finally dies. The Earth may miss her (and the trees may remember her), but the animals lives upon the Earth will not. (pg. 132) In this way she may be immortal, but her immortality will be meaningless.
It is near the end of the book, on page 202 (of 221) that the book brings these themes together and enunciates its main moral. The girl is explaining to the bear how she survived during the bear’s hibernation. The passage reads:
And she told him how she made snowshoes and a bow, but even so she could find no game to hunt or hit with the arrows she had made, and she was certain she would starve. Then she dreamed of a bear who had given her a fish, and she woke and went to the river to fish through the ice. That was when an eagle brought her a goose, whose feathers she used to make better arrows, and she began hunting again by speaking first to the forest and the animals, telling them of her gratitude for what they would give her, but knowing she could not have survived the winter without what she had been given, regardless of what she made.
Do you see the anti-human neo-paganism of it all? The passage is all about the Nature Goddess that communicates with the girl, the last Earth Mother, through nature visions and provides for her through the ministry of animals and without whom no human can ever survive no matter how smart or creative or resourceful. And if you fail to recognize this then you are, like all other humans, arrogantly divorced from nature – a condition which will inevitably lead to your individual and our collective annihilation. These two messages in tandem are the moral of the story.
The girl is a Reverse Odysseus. He was a hero because through the use of his human cunning he overcame all the trials and monsters who came against him in order to return home and claim his kingdom, taming nature at its highest personification as he defied and defeated the gods themselves. In contrast, the girl realizes that she is small and meaningless, that no matter how smart she is, no matter how cunning she may be, no matter what she does, she is subject to Nature. Not only can she not survive without subservience to nature, she can achieve nothing without Nature’s blessing.
The big problem with this moral is that the story that supports it is stupid, making it stupid in turn.
How To Destroy A Story
I don’t mean stupid in the sense that neo-paganism and a hatred of human achievement are stupid.
I mean stupid in the sense that the actual story is stupid.
To start with, the father and girl leave their home in order to travel to the sea in order to gather sea salt. This makes no sense though because they hunt meat. If nothing else, the meats they would hunt (such as deer) would provide them with all the salt they would need. Likewise, they don’t need salt to preserve their foods. Plants preserve for 4-8 months in a root cellar, especially in New Hampshire where much of the year is cold and winters are frozen. As Winter neared, you could smoke meat and then put it in your root cellar which would act as a refrigerator, freezing it for most of the season. So, even the premise that kicks off the main storyline makes no sense. There is no reason for the father and the girl to travel to the sea. But, really, these are the least of the story’s problems.
After her father dies, all of the problems the girl faces are because she listened to a bear and decided to try and beat the Winter back home without any significant source of food or shelter. If she had simply stayed by the ocean she would have enjoyed a much milder Winter (see Extension section.) Instead of trekking across the wilds of post-apocalyptic New Hampshire, the girl could have spent that time preparing for the oncoming Winter by gathering edible plants, fishing, and trapping small game. She even had time to construct another bow and arrows to hunt and kill larger game. She already had a cave to live inside for Winter and had time to prepare it for the coming cold, perhaps by building a simple wall to keep in the warmth and keep out any animals or inclement weather. When Spring came she could have just gone back to her home and buried her father like she ended up doing anyway.
That these weren’t her first thoughts, even though she had grown up all her life in the area and knew how early the snows came and how bitter they were when they did come, is an inexcusable lapse from the author, a basic failure in writing. Everything up to this point sets us up to expect this story to turn into a literary version of the TV series Alone. She has been trained from infancy with the skills she needs to survive in extreme conditions all on her own. Good writing would capitalize on what the writer spent the first half of the book telling us about this girl. Instead we get an incoherent story about a girl who should have known better acting like a moron for reasons that are inexplicable to everyone involved.
Why? Well, perhaps the failure on Krivak’s part to at least address these issues isn’t a failure at all. He needs the girl to be stupid enough and weak enough to be freezing and starving to death without direct intervention from Nature in order to drive home his moral about how stupid and weak humanity is and how we will destroy ourselves unless we turn to some kind of neo-pagan Nature subservience as a society. If so, that is even worse because it means that Krivak crippled his own story in the name of preaching, he sacrificed story for messaging. The result is a narrative mess with intelligent characters who repeatedly act stupidly in service of ramming the author’s message down the throat of the reader. This is just terrible storytelling. And it breaks the entire second half of the book. As the story falls more and more to Krivak’s need to proselyte his anti-human message, the more nonsensical and bad the story becomes until it finally collapses under the weight of bad storytelling and terrible moralizing.
Utter Dehumanization
Page 203 contains a line that signals the culminating message of the story is upon us, telling us that the girl has begun to truly abandon her humanity and become a beast of the field as if this degradation and dehumanization is a positive outcome. After recounting how the bear curls up against an old tree trunk to sleep, we are told that the girl gathers a bunch of pine needles together beside the bear to be used as a bed:
She lay there for a long time, smelling the sweet scent of ground mixed with the fur smell of the bear. She felt at home there, watching Virgo and Sagittarius, the hunter, drift across the sky.
Emphasis in italics my own.
The fact that the girl sees Virgo, the virgin maiden, and Sagittarius, the hunter, in the sky is a little on the nose. These constellations clearly symbolize both the girl, destined to be a virgin forever beyond her maiden years, and her father, a mighty hunter who used a bow as Sagittarius does. As these constellations, symbolizing her and her father, fade in the night sky, so does her humanity. We see the beginning of this in the fact that the girl now feels at home in the wilds, sleeping in the dirt and filth with the animals as an animal herself. From this moment on the story begins to show us how she systematically discards her humanity in order to embrace animality.
On page 215, the girl finally buries her father’s bones in a shallow grave covered in stones like her mother was buried. The girl she takes the compass her father gave her and buries it with him. In doing so, she buried all the direction he gave to her. It is a ritual rejection of him and all the wisdom from her forefathers passed down to her through him. She will no longer be directed by the knowledge of men, she will no longer live by the ways of men. Instead she will embrace Nature and live like a natural creature, i.e. and animal as if the natural world, and Nature itself, is not “red in tooth and claw” and survives by something other than killing and consuming. The neo-pagan idolization of (and delusion about) nature is very strong and very evident here. The implicit message is that women are peaceful Earth Mothers, who care about all those around them while men are Conquerors which dominate everything around them. It is just another form of the old Transcendentalist lie that human civilization is a place of corruption and chaos that can only be overcome by “returning to Nature.”
Now that the girl has become one with nature by becoming an animal herself, wild animals come “to her without fear of dominion” (pg. 217) Meaning, that because she has renounced her humanity she will not try and control them because she is now one of them. Again, humans dominate while animals do not. This renunciation of her humanity is highlighted in how she now lives:
She no longer went inside the house. The ruined books, the leather-bound tablets of paper on which she once wrote, and the wooden furniture her father had made had all fed fires that warmed her on cool nights of early spring and late autumn. The window glass was broken and scattered along the floor. The roof and walls slouched and buckled and became unsound, until she came back from the island one spring and found that these, too, had fallen in, and she burned the timber and shakes piece by piece in her fire.
The Bear, pgs. 217-218
The last bit of human knowledge that she has, some of the greatest and most meaningful works of human hand and mind which have lasted for thousands of years, she consigns to the flames. Where she used to love reading and writing she has now abandoned it because animals do not need to read or write. No matter how much better a house would be than the cave she sleeps in during the colder months or the lake shore mud (or sometimes a handmade vine hammock) she sleeps on during the warmer months, she abandons it completely. (pg. 217) The girl finds peace by abandoning and destroying all vestiges of human civilization. She now lives, thinks, and acts as an animal. She is even naked (pg. 218), despite the fact that the human body is exceedingly frail and women especially have to pay attention to delicate issues of breast pain and mensuration. (I imagine getting a vaginal infection because you’ve been sleeping in the dirt like an animal is not an enjoyable experience, especially if you have no medicine or knowledge of how to get rid of the infection safely.) The rest of her life, no matter how stupid it is when you think about it for more than a few minutes, is an utter rejection of humanity and a complete embrace of becoming an animal.
And this kind of degradation is presented as being a positive for both the protagonist and the planet.
If you are wondering how a virgin could possibly be an Earth Mother, the book does solve this problem. When the girl dies – somehow having inexplicably lived to old age despite malnutrition, disease, exposure, and a whole host of other dangers – her body collapses to the ground and:
…shoots of grass, wildflowers, and young maples grew around and through her soft and sunken body.
The Bear, pg. 219
So, she literally gave birth to the Earth, bearing in and through her body the plants that make up life on the planet. In death, the girl, now an old woman, has become a literal Earth Mother. And at her death, the Earth observes a moment of silence for her before being reborn as a human free planet. (pg. 221)
Final Thoughts
Don’t waste your time on this book. The writing style was done better by McCarthy. The story is nonsensical. Messaging is more important than storytelling, resulting in stupid plot points and stupid characters. The morals of the story are deeply evil – that human civilization is a plague on the planet, the women are the chosen sex to reunite with Mother Earth, that men are corrupt dominators who will destroy the planet, that peace is only found in a paganistic “union” with nature, that the great works of art and literature of human history mean nothing, that we must degrade and dehumanize ourselves to a more animalistic form of existence in order to be better, that Mother Nature should be the idol of our subservience. This kind of propaganda exists to get you to hate yourself, to hate those around you, to hate human civilization. It only benefits the society breakers. You will be worse off mentally, emotionally, and spiritually if you read this book.
Don’t subject yourself to this kind of propaganda when there are so many better options out there.
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