SOURCE: Steed, J. P. “Bass's ‘Fires’ and ‘Elk.’” Explicator 59, no. 1 (fall 2000): 54-6.

In the following essay, Steed discusses the importance of the biblical mythos of fire to Bass's short stories “Fires” and “Elk.”

In Judeo-Christian mythology, fire is associated with divinity and, more specifically, with the simultaneous acts of destruction and creation, or “renewal.” There is the pillar of fire leading the Israelites out of Egypt (Exodus 13.21), which is expressly personified and identified as “the Lord”; it is associated with renewal in that it is the means by which the Israelites are saved, or led out of the wilderness. And there is Isaiah's use of fire when he says, “the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff” (5.24). Such personification can be seen as further association with a form of divinity, and although destruction is in the foreground here, the association of fire with renewal is...