Foust on Bear Stories

Just read "Bear Stories" again after reading some comments. First time I read this I did not "get" it all--just seemed like four unconnected vignettes about bears that did not, for me, add up to anything greater. I did notice that the author took care to particularize the species of bear (black bears in 1 and 2, and Grizzlies in 2,3 and 5) but did not understand why. I also noticed that POV was moving around quite a bit. After reading it again, I saw that I could rank the sections along a spectrum of narrative distance, from closest to furthest, as follows:

5: 1st person, just the narrator (no other people) and the bear, in the distance
2: 3rd person, but we are hearing the words exactly as the "I" hears them. It is if we are in the "I's" shoes, hearing old John's words. The bear here is a hypothetical bear. The section is framed in past tense (John "told me") but the words John speaks are in present and future tense.
4: 1st person singular and plural--the I is telling a story that involves two people (Old John and I) encountering, shooting, and unsuccessfully trailing a real bear. It is all past tense, but the I is recounting his own memory of something.
3: 3rd person. Laverne (who is this?) is telling a story about a real bear, the first bear he shot. The I is remembering being told of a memory that belongs to someone else (Laverne)--a memory of a memory, the whole thing in past tense.
1. 3rd person removed, as someone else said, twice. (I'd say it is removed more than twice) What we are getting is someone we don't know's aunt's account of a newspaper story, itself a third person account of an event that happened to someone other than the reporter. all past tense. The story is about a real bear.

So I notice that the narrative distance is being played with through POV and tense, and that I am being directed to pay more attention to how the story is being told than to the facts of the stories. I also notice that besides the reader's distance from the narrative, there is also being played with the distance from the bears. Here is how I'd rank how close I felt to the bears, from closest to furthest:

2: the beat here is a hypothetical bear. It is weird that I feel farthest from a real bear in the section where I felt almost closest to the narrative.
5: the bear is real, but it is really far away (again, odd, b/c this is the section where I felt closest to the narrator)
3: the bear is real, but does not seem like a victim--seems fearsome, awesome, mythic, almost eems like its killing was necessary, even heroic.
1: the bear is real and horrific, but I felt some sympathy for it b/c what the father did was so stupid and the bear was just doing what a bear would do. Interesting how the facts here (bear eating the hands of a little girl) work AGAINST how the narrative is making me think about the bear--a victim of the father's stupidity.
4: the most real bear to me, the one I most sympathized with. He cried like a baby after being shot (and not in self defense) and then dragged off, presumably to die in agony, like Galway Kinneal's bear in "The Bear"--horrible.

So now maybe I am getting a little more why the author was making the point about black bears versus Grizzlies--they are not all the same, they are not symbols or myths but living, individual creatures who are the victims of our terror of them, terror we feel even when they are miles upwind of us, eating blueberries.

I wanted the facts of the four stories to hang together, to "mean" something. But I see that was not the author's intent. Maybe what it all adds up to is that very few of us, if any, have ever actually had a first person encounter with a bear. Maybe everything we know about them (this is true for me, certainly) is gotten by hearsay, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th hand. Maybe we should question what we think we know about bears.