The Bear Prince Character Analysis

The bear prince is a character in the story-within-a-story in “Telling Fairy Tales.” He begins life as a human prince but turns into a bear sometime around his first birthday—the price’s mother had paid a witch to make a king fall in love with her. The Polish man Karol adopts the bear prince when he finds the cub sleeping in the woods, and the two soon become very close. The bear prince eventually becomes a mascot for Karol’s regiment during World War II. He grows into a gentle giant and his presence gives the men something to fight for. In order to keep the bear prince with Karol, the army eventually makes him a corporal so he can accompany the regiment to Italy. Especially in the face of of all the carnage that Karol and the regiment see in Italy, the bear prince reminds the soldiers that there’s something worth living for. Throughout the story, the bear prince struggles with the idea of love—he knows he’s a human inside a bear’s body, and he fears that nobody will truly be able to love him because he’s not fully human or animal. After the war, the bear prince lives out the rest of his days in the Edinburgh zoo in Scotland. The character is based off of Wojtak, a brown bear that accompanied a regiment of Polish Soldiers through the Middle East and to Italy during World War II.