How I Killed A Bear

Dying isn’t just a part of the human condition, but central to it.

Everyone dies, and most of us are afraid of it. Out of the sets of stories

to choose from them for this essay, I was drawn to describe an image

involving fear of death in the story of How I Killed a Bear in the book:

The Hunting Of The Deer And Other Essays written by by Charles

Dudley Warner, who was a writer who spent time (and actually killed a

bear!) in the Adirondacks. The title suggests a feat of heroic manliness

but the narrative seems to mock this implication. The story is about a

man who is told by housekeepers at his cottage to fetch some

blackberries. He sets off with a tin pail but grabs a gun on his way out

so as to maintain an appearance of

When Warner first notices the bear while “blackberrying”, he freezes.

His first thought, rather than to shoot it, it to give it a pail of

blackberries to distract it as he attempts to flee. When he realizes that

the bear is close behind, he reluctantly shoots the animal. This

encounter mocks the ideal of manly ruggedness, which the guides

were thought to exemplify, and suggests that it is often merely an act.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human beings like

nothing else. My target is to analyze the image in details to better

understand how the writer managed to induce feelings toward the

moments accompanying death. On page (24) Warner writes

“I heard the bear crashing through the brush after me. Enraged at my

duplicity, he was now coming on with blood in his eye. I felt that the

time of one of us was probably short. The rapidity of thought at such

moments of peril is well known.” This paragraph reflects

Predatory death anxiety arises from the fear of being harmed when

the writer encountered the bear. It is the most basic and oldest