At the core of "The Bear," as in any other work by William Faulkner, is the sense that time is much less an objective fact of human existence than what the individual, as an organic part of human collectivity, makes of it. In the Faulknerian world, time is not there simply as an entity external to the human being, nor as a solely subjective quantity, but as a living continuum at once inside and outside the human mind and psyche, in relation to which the human being continually shapes and defines all experience by continually reshaping and redefining it.