Doug-- I for one enjoyed your message and your enthusiasm. It's always worth recalling that when Faulkner, during an interview, was asked to name his favorite characters, his reply started something like "Huck and Jim, of course." And THEN he went on to list characters by Dickens and Shakespeare. He also included Sut Lovingood in his list, and explained to the interviewer who Sut was. Sometimes I think that's as important as Faulkner's debt to Twain: Their common roots in the Southwest humor tradition. I've always loved Faulkner's way of spinning the same material as tragedy and comedy. (In that regard, I think he transcended Twain and nearly all other American authors.) "The Bear" is tragedy. But you might enjoy the short story "A Bear Hunt," which is told by a hick version of Ratliff, the great comic character in The Hamlet. Similarly, when told by Ratliff in The Hamlet the tale of Ab(?) Snopes tracking manure on DeSpain's fine carpet and the events that followed is richly comic. But when seen through the eyes of a child who desperately wants to love his warped father, "Barn Burning" becomes a deeply moving tale of initiation. Do you know The Sound and the Fury? Jason Compson, it seems to me, shows what could be done with Huck Finn's kind of voice, if the speaker were a nasty adult rather than a loveable child. And again, there's that incredible, Shakespeare-like jumping between the tragic and the darkly comic: For 90 pages we live inside the sad, sad mind of Quentin Compson, on the day that ends when he goes off to drown himself. And then we turn the page and have Jason: "Of course I never got to go to Harvard, where they teach you to take a swim without knowing how to swim..." Thanks for the reminder of how great Faulkner can be. Mark Coburn