[In the following excerpt, Hassan contrasts the two main characters—Ed and Lewis—in Dickey's novel Deliverance.]

In contrast to Bellow's and Mailer's fictions, James Dickey's Deliverance (1970) seems less a quest than a brutal tale of survival. The reader may wonder: deliverance from what? From moral complacencies, social pieties, perhaps from civilization itself? The clues are scattered, and in one place they become nearly explicit. Making love to his wife on the morning of his fateful adventure, the narrator, Ed Gentry, imagines—he is on the whole steady, unimaginative—the golden eye of a girl, a studio model: “The gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.” Another life, deliverance: there lies the book's knot, which links its two heroes, Ed Gentry and Lewis Medlock, doubles.

Ed—all are called by their first names—is practical and forthright, given to the task at hand; Lewis is visionary. Lewis seeks immortality and learns finally to settle for death. In the interim, he trains himself implacably, trains his instincts, will, and powerful body, to survive an atomic holocaust in the Georgia woods. He insists on turning the canoe trip of four urban businessmen into a moral, a life principle, a way, a provocation to everything Western civilization has achieved in three thousand years. He wants to recover something absolutely essential and in doing so to perform some superhuman feat that beggars eternity. But Lewis breaks his leg early on the trip—again that wound—and Ed pulls the survivors through after two murders and one death by drowning.

The scene is perfectly set for the encounter between nature and civilization, instinct and law, within the West itself. An entire region of the north Georgia wilderness is about to drown, turned into a serviceable lake. The Cahulawassee River, with its horrendously beautiful whitewater rapids, must vanish. Ageless hillbilly cemeteries must be moved to higher ground. Marinas and real estate developments will appear on the dammed lake. On the eve of their departure, the four white, married, middle-class men pore over a colored map of the region, intuiting the secret harmonies of the land, thinking that, henceforth, a fragment of the American wilderness will survive only in archives and the failing memories of old woodsmen.

Excepting Lewis, though, these businessmen are unfit to venture; they have learned to meet existence mainly on legal, domestic, or social terms. Still, they sense obscurely an alternative to their humdrum lives. “Up yonder,” Lewis tells them, life demands to be taken on other terms, as they discover in scene after harrowing scene, in encounters with the stupendous force of nature (the rapids) and malevolence of man (hillbilly outlaws). Yet, too, they experience a strange happiness at the heart of violence. Three of them survive, irrevocably altered.

Dickey's novel is a masterpiece in the poetry of action and menace. Relentlessly, it renders, in a prose at once tight, elusive, and earthy, the atavism and terror of two autumn days in the Georgia woods. The book spares no detail in the struggle of life for itself. But the book also reveals instants of subtle intimacy, moments of pure being. Having climbed, with bare hands, the sheer face of a gorge to kill a man at daybreak, Ed suddenly exclaims:

What a view. What a view. But I had my eyes closed. The river was running in my mind, and I raised my lids and saw exactly what had been the image of my thought. For a second I did not know what I was seeing and what I was imagining; there was such an utter sameness that it didn't matter; both were the river. It spread there eternally, the moon so huge on it that it hurt the eyes, and the mind, too, flinched like an eye. What? I said. Where? There was nowhere but here. Who, though? Unknown. Where can I start? … What a view I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence. What was there?

Perhaps this is the selflessness of every mountaineer, every adventurer, at his moment of truth, healing all wounds.

Dickey prefixes an epitaph from Georges Bataille that proposes a “principle of insufficiency” at the base of human existence. The radical lack may underlie all life as perceived by human beings. Something is always buried, hidden, lost to us: murdered bodies lying under forest leaves, the forest itself flooded beneath a lake, hillbillies invisible, colonized within their own state, some part of our own nature, concealed and irreclaimable. Ed and Lewis—Ed becomes Lewis—manage to discover this perilous part of existence and manage through great pain to reclaim it. But they must also face the ordinary world again, which Ed sees, at the end, in the image of a policeman: “When we reached town [the policeman] went into a cafe and made a couple of calls. It frightened me some to watch him talk through the tripled glass—windshield, plate glass, and phone booth—for it made me feel caught in the whole vast, inexorable web of modern communication.” The feeling passes, for Ed possesses the river permanently: “Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally.” So ends his quest.