James Dickey on the set of the film
version of Deliverance (1972),
for which he wrote the script and
in which he had a small role as a sheriff.

                                                                                                                                                       Tout 1

John Tout
Dr. Clifton Snider
English 270B/384
8 January 2000

    James Dickey's first novel, Deliverance (1970), is many things.  First, it is an intensely exciting adventure story: four middle class, respectable southern men take a trip down the Cahulawassee River in northern Georgia on a lark.  Second, it is a story about two cultures in conflict: city men against country folk. Deep in the woods, remote from civilization, the narrator, Ed Gentry, and one of his companions encounter two country men, "crackers" from the hills.  The companion, Bobby, is raped at gunpoint; and Ed is about to be raped when his would-be rapist is shot dead with an arrow by Ed's best friend, Lewis. The other hillbilly escapes and stalks the men, killing one of them.  The city men are faced with several moral dilemmas: what to do with the dead body, whether to tell the authorities what happened, what to do with their slain friend, and whether to tell their families. Clearly the novel is an archetypal journey from innocence to experience and one that is particularly American.

    At the beginning of the novel Ed, co-owner of a graphic art agency, points out his difference from Lewis: "I had nothing like his [Lewis's] drive . . . he was . . . the first to take a chance" (12). Furthermore, "He was not only self-determined; he was determined" (9). Unlike Ed, whose hair is receding, whose "hips and belly were heavy but solid," and who expects to age quickly (30), Lewis keeps in top physical shape through lifting weights every day.  He is sort of a mentor for Ed and has taught him archery. It is Lewis's influence which persuades Ed finally to take the potentially perilous journey down the river.  He knows he can count on Lewis in a crisis to take the most appropriate actions.

    Upon reaching the country town of Oree, Lewis has to negotiate with some local folk to drive the city men's cars to the town where they plan to end their canoe trip.  Ed makes a comment that is both naive and prescient: "There is always something wrong with people in the country" (51). He wishes he could avoid the trip, but "there was no way for me to escape, except by water" (52).

    A trip by water that leads to experience, often symbolized by some kind of prize such as a golden fleece, is hardly unique to American literature. However, in some ways Deliverance does correspond to a pattern Leslie Fiedler identifies as especially American in his famous essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Hunk Honey!" Fiedler maintains that most of our American classics, like Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, and Two Years Before the Mast, are "boy's books" (Henry James is the big exception, 305). Not only do these books "proffer a chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience" (305), but also they offer "the mutual love of a white man and a colored" (307, Fiedler's italics). While this is not true of Deliverance (Ed and Lewis are both white), there is the homoerotic aspect that characterizes so much of our classic literature of the nineteenth century (Whitman and Dickinson are not exceptions), despite Ed's explicit heterosexuality at the beginning of the novel (his attraction to a female model and his making love with his wife). Until their trip, Ed had never seen Lewis without his clothes. When he does see him, he marvels: "I had never seen such a male body in my life." Between the two men there's a tacit acknowledgement of Ed's admiration of the years of work Lewis had put into his body: "the payoff was in my eyes," Ed comments (90).

    Referring to Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg and Twain's Huck and Jim, Fiedler writes:

        Nature undefiled--this is the inevitable
        setting for the Sacred Marriage of males . . .
        it is the motion of water which completes
        the syndrome, the American dream of
        isolation afloat. . . . The immensity of
        water defines a loneliness that demands
        love; its strangeness symbolizes the
        disavowal of the conventional that makes
        possible all versions of love. (309)¹

After Lewis kills the alien hillbilly (city man versus country) who is about to force Ed to perform fellatio on him, the other hillbilly having already sodomized Bobby and then escaped, Ed is simultaneously shocked and calmed by what Lewis has done.  "I moved," Ed says, "without being completely aware of movement, nearer to him. I would have liked nothing better than to touch that big relaxed forearm as he stood there . . . I would have followed him anywhere, and I realized that I was going to have to do just that" (111).

    The irony is that Ed is able to follow Lewis only so far. The four city men carry the hillbilly's body to a remote place in the woods and bury it. Then they set out in two canoes to get as far down the river as they can, knowing they cannot reach their destination in a single day. They encounter some difficult rapids in which their canoes overturn and Drew, the fourth man, is apparently shot to death by the other hillbilly while Lewis breaks his leg. He is totally incapacitated, so that Ed must now, as it were, exchange roles with Lewis. "'It's you,'" Lewis tells him. "'It's got to be you'" (129).

    It is now up to Ed to devise a strategy to save himself, Bobby, and Lewis, and physically to carry the strategy out.  That means climbing a dangerous and steep cliff up the side of the river in the dark of night and stalking the man who had murdered Drew. Doing so, Ed feels "the most entire aloneness that I have ever been given."  Yet there is "joy at the thought of where I was and what I was doing" (137).  He carries out his mission. That there is some doubt as to whether Ed has killed the right man illustrates one of the several moral ambiguities in the book. The answers as to whether Ed and the others have made the right choices are left to the reader.

    Later the men come across Drew's body, and Ed knows that to escape prosecution they must sink the body in the river and make up a story for the authorities about what had happened to them.  He has assumed the qualities he had admired in Lewis, all but the muscular body, though he himself suffers a self-inflicted albeit accidental wound from his remaining arrow. He is now symbolic of the wounded hero, the savior figure, albeit still an ordinary man, a hero of what Frye calls the "low mimetic mode . . . of realistic fiction . . . superior neither to other men nor to his environment . . . one of us" (34, italics Frye's).²

    Ed is not without the guilt Fiedler refers to. Fiedler's is a guilt for the victimization of the "colored man" by the white man, whereas Ed's is for his killing of the mountain man and his silence about the truth.  He has been faced with a lot of moral choices; he has killed, he has lied, and now he must lie again, to his wife and to Drew's wife--all to survive.  He realizes he has "undervalued" (229) his wife, Martha, and their love is reaffirmed.

    Yet he can never tell her the full story of what happened on the river nor share the fear he might some day be found out. Bobby eventually moves away.  But Ed and Lewis remain friends and share the truth of what happened.  Lewis, who has a permanent limp from his broken leg, feels "the true weight and purpose of all water" (235), a means of initiation, of spiritual rebirth.  As for Ed, "The river underlies, in one way or another, everything I do" (234).  He has won the golden fleece that only experience can give: knowledge, maturity, and a solemn bond.  And he has done it in a specifically American context.

    ¹Water, of course, is an archetype, a "symbol," to use the words of Northrop Frye, "which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience" (99). Although more narrow than Jung's definition of an archetype, this definition will do for the purposes of this essay.

    ²Frye is careful to qualify his adjectives: "'High' and 'low' have no connotations of comparative value, but are purely diagrammatic" (34).

Dickey, James. Deliverance. New York: Dell, 1970.

Fiedler, Leslie, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," from An End of Innocence. 1952.

    Rpt. Five Approaches of Literary Criticism. Ed. Wilbur S. Scott. New York: Collier, 1962. 303-12.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. New York: Atheneum, 1965.