SOURCE: Baughman, Ronald. “Deliverance.” In Understanding James Dickey, pp. 109-21. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Baughman explores the theme of renewal in Deliverance.]

How Dickey changes and forms again is dramatically demonstrated in his only novel to date, Deliverance. In this work his protagonist achieves the renewal—the deliverance—for which the writer has struggled throughout his poetry. The speaker is able to find a new order, a new connection, a new sense of real well-being that becomes his passionate affirmation of life. Because the economy of language required in poetry does not allow for the expansive analysis that fiction provides, it is understandable that Dickey most fully develops this transforming function of survivor's guilt in his novel.

The ordeal shared by the four suburbanites who travel down the river in Deliverance clearly parallels that confronting the soldier in combat. In the first chapter of the novel, “Before,” the suburbanites are revealed as quite ordinary men leading quite ordinary, inconsequential lives; they, like raw recruits, have not tested their courage or themselves. During the central three chapters—“September 14th,” “September 15th,” and “September 16th”—they are brutalized both by the wild river and by vicious mountain men; in order to survive they, like soldiers, must conquer and kill their enemies and must witness death in their own ranks. Finally, throughout the last chapter, “After,” survivors of the trip must come to terms with their death encounters; they must, like combat veterans, weigh their responsibilities for the deaths they have caused and observed. Such is the process that protagonist Ed Gentry goes through as he seeks and ultimately attains deliverance.

The “Before” section of the novel establishes the individual characters and histories of the four suburbanites. Bobby Trippe, who works with mutual funds, is the figure most acclimated to city life. Popular and social, he is “a pleasant surface human being,” though Ed has once seen him blow up at a party with “the rage of a weak king”¹. Bobby is the least inclined of the four to take the canoe trip through the wilds. Drew Ballinger, who seems to regard nature as a picturesque location for mountain musicians, is a solid citizen and company man: “He worked as a sales supervisor for a big soft-drink company and he believed in it and the things it said it stood for with his very soul” (9). Drew also becomes a spokesman for the laws of civilization during the trip. That he has a son bearing “some kind of risen hornlike blood blister on his forehead that his eyebrow grew out of and around in a way to make you realize the true horrors of biology” (9) should warn him about nature's defiance of man's laws; yet Ballinger remains a naïve though well-intentioned man.

Lewis Medlock, who lives on the revenues of inherited rental properties, devotes himself wholeheartedly to fitness in order to be prepared for the time when “the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body, once and for all” (42). He wishes to test himself to see if he is capable of withstanding or triumphing over the wilderness in its most primitive state: “You might say I've got the survival craze, the real bug” (43). What he prepares for is his own immortality, his victory over man and nature and death. He approaches the experience of the weekend trip armed with primitive weapons—a bow and arrow, a knife, and a canoe. But his most important weapon, he feels, is his “values” (48), his mental attitude, which earlier had enabled him to crawl unassisted out of the woods with a painfully broken ankle. Lewis admires the “dependability” (47) of the mountain people in equipping themselves for the rigors of a natural, primitive existence, even though they are “ignorant and full of superstition and bloodshed and murder and liquor and hookworm and ghosts and early deaths” (49). Lewis becomes Ed Gentry's primary instructor in the art of surviving nature's—and man's—violence.

Ed, the narrator-protagonist, is a “get-through-the-day-man” who is “mainly interested in sliding” (41). He has reduced his work, his relationships, and, indeed, his entire life to the “mechanical”: “I was a mechanic of the graphic arts, and when I could get the problem to appear mechanical to me, and not the result of inspiration, I could do something with it. … And that, as far as art was concerned, was it” (26-27). He is pleased with the idea of the unpressured, “no-sweat shop” (13) that he and his partner run, yet the description suggests a place of little real commitment. And, in fact, he scorns would-be artists who, “like George Holley, my old Braque man,” say, “I am with you but not of you” (15). Even with his wife, Martha, who believes more in his talent than he himself does, Ed responds primarily to her “normalcy”—her “toughness that got things done,” her “practical approach to sex” (28)—rather than to the “absolutely personal connection” (26) that she has once offered. Like many of the figures in Dickey's war poetry Ed is imprisoned, but his primary cage is his sense of his life's worthlessness: “The feeling of the inconsequence of whatever I would do, of anything I would pick up or think about or turn to see was at that moment being set in the very bone marrow. … It was the old mortal, helpless, time-terrified human feeling” (18).

The nature of the wilderness that these four suburbanites enter is suggested by the mountain people they encounter in the town of Oree. Physically and mentally twisted by inter-marriage, inadequate health care, and the hardships of their lives, these inhabitants of “the country of nine-fingered people” (56) seem hostile toward the city dwellers. Drew shares a guitar-banjo duet with an albino boy who has “pink eyes like a white rabbit's; one of them stared off at a furious and complicated angle. That was the eye he looked at us with, with his face set in another direction. The sane, rational eye was fixed on something that wasn't there, somewhere in the dust of the road” (58-59). Although Ballinger and the boy make musical connection, no other sort is invited. Furthermore, as the suburbanites negotiate with—and antagonize—the Griner brothers, who reluctantly agree to deliver Lewis's car to Aintry, Ed notes the Hadeslike environment of the mountain men's garage:

It was dark and iron-smelling, hot with the closed-in heat that brings the sweat out as though it had been waiting all over your body for the right signal. Anvils stood around or lay on their sides, and chains hung down, covered with coarse, deep grease. The air was full of hooks; there were sharp points everywhere—tools and nails and ripped-open rusty tin cans … and through everything, out of the high roof, mostly, came this clanging hammering, meant to deafen and even blind.

(62)

The imagery of the description explicitly conveys the danger these men and others like them pose to intruders from another culture.

The river itself, the Cahulawassee, offers both threat and promise to the suburbanites. Like the rivers and streams of Dickey's poetry it functions as a pathway to death as well as to life. Entering the Cahulawassee, the four men note its pollution—a severed chicken's head reminds Ed of a human head—and throughout their trip the men are battered by its force. Yet when Gentry first steps into the water to free his canoe from rocks, he senses its positive power: “It felt profound, its motion built into it by the composition of the earth for hundreds of miles upstream and down, and by thousands of years. The standing there was so good, so fresh and various and continuous, so vital and uncaring around my genitals, that I hated to leave it” (75). Embracing his sexual-creative parts, the river provides his baptism into nature. This experience is confirmed by an encounter Ed has that night when an owl lands on his tent roof. He touches its talon, and he then imagines that he hunts with the bird as it repeatedly leaves and returns to his tent: “I hunted with him as well as I could, there in my weightlessness. The woods burned in my head. Toward morning I could reach up and touch the claw without turning on the light” (89).

The connections between man and river, man and bird, signal the beginning of Gentry's movement from the civilized world into the world of nature. As he awakens next morning and prepares to hunt while the others sleep, he realizes that in this place “none—or almost none—of my daily ways of living my life would work” (93). He begins to abandon his habit of sliding; and walking through a dense river fog “exactly to my teeth” (96), he seems to disappear and then reemerge into a new state of being. However, he badly misses his bow-and-arrow shot at a deer, revealing that he is still a novice, still only partially formed.

Later the same morning comes the encounter with nature—and with nature's men—that puts Ed and his friends to their first real test. Gentry and Bobby, who share a canoe, become separated from the other pair because of Bobby's ineptness. Growing tired of fighting the waters, of “learning the hard way” (107), they decide to rest in the apparent safety of the riverbank. They find there, instead, the real threat of two mountain men whose appearance and movements suggest Dickey's earlier descriptions of snakes and sharks, his embodiments of absolute but indifferent evil:

One of them, the taller one, narrowed in the eyes and face. They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. … The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs.

(108)

Nature's men in nature's setting sodomize Bobby and threaten Ed. But when one of the men tells Ed to “Fall down on your knees and pray, boy. And you better pray good” (116), Gentry's prayer is answered not by God but instead by Lewis, another of nature's creatures, who shoots the older man through the chest with his bow and arrow and frightens the other man into the woods. Clearly in this setting life is reduced to its simplest terms; in the wilderness, as in combat, man kills or is killed.

What action should follow, however, is not so easily resolved by the suburbanites, and each man's position indicates the degree to which he is bound by civilization's conventional beliefs. Drew, for example, says that they should “Listen to reason” (130), that they have committed “justified homicide” (121), and that the legal system will give them a fair trial if they tell “the whole story” (121). Lewis, at the other extreme, dismisses Drew's views as “boy scoutish” (123); he declares that the men themselves are the law, that “no body, no crime” (125), and that there is “not any right thing” (123) except what they determine is right. When asked for his opinion, Bobby fulfills Ed's earlier description of his having “the rage of a weak king” by repeatedly kicking the mountain man's corpse in the face.

While the others argue, Gentry tries to define his own position by turning to the river: “I tried to think ahead, and I couldn't see anything but desperate trouble, and for the rest of my life. … I could feel myself beginning to breathe fast in the stillness. … I listened to the woods and the river to see if I could get an answer” (123-24). Like the combat veteran, Ed realizes that this death encounter will stay with him forever, and his appeal to nature further confirms the transformation occurring within him. Finally the four agree to bury the dead man, conceal their actions, and live with the guilt they share. In killing the man they have done what they had to do, they decide, and only Drew believes that confession would save them. Yet like the combat-veteran speaker in “The Firebombing,” they are uncertain about whether ultimately they should be granted absolution or sentence for their actions.

After the men have buried the mountain man and started down the river again, Ed concedes that “something came to an edge in me. … A gigantic steadiness took me over … that added up to a kind of equilibrium” (139). This equilibrium is tested by disastrous events. The men are thrown into the river, and Ed feels the life-threatening nature of his second baptism: “I turned over and over. I rolled, I tried to crawl along the flying bottom. Nothing worked. I was dead. I felt myself fading out into the unbelievable violence and brutality of the river, joining it. … I got on my back and poured with the river, sliding over the stones like a creature I had always contained but never released” (144). This experience marks his full recognition of nature's power and of men's proper relationship with it: not to fight it but to merge with it, adopt its methods. Ed's realization comes at exactly the right moment, for Drew has been killed—possibly by a shot from the cliffs above the river—and Lewis, the group's leader, has broken his leg. Ed therefore must assume command, and he feels infused with a new inner power: “I liked hearing the sound of my voice in the mountain speech. … It sounded like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing” (152-53).

That Gentry has achieved oneness with nature is revealed through his climb up a mountainside to hunt the surviving mountain man, who may or may not be stalking the suburbanites. Before he begins his ascent, Ed again approaches the river:

Then for some reason I stepped into the edge of the river. In a way, I guess, I wanted to get a renewed feel of all the elements present. … I stood with the cold water flowing around my calves and my head back, watching the cliff slant up into the darkness. More stars had come out around the top of the gorge, a kind of river of them.

(156)

His vision fuses river, mountain, and stars, and as he begins his ascent, he himself connects with the natural elements. In the darkness he finds himself in a dreamlike state, one in which he becomes a wary but sensitive lover of the mountainside: “With each shift to a newer and higher position I felt more and more tenderness toward the wall. … I turned back into the cliff and leaned my mouth against it, feeling all the way out through my nerves and muscles exactly how I had possession of the wall … in a way that held the whole thing together” (163). Ed's connection with the cliff is throughout expressed in sexual terms. Furthermore, several times during his ascent he has dangerous slips; “Often a hand or foot would slide and then catch on something I knew, without knowing, would be there, and I would go on up” (177). Because his instincts are now thoroughly those of nature, he can find the secure spots without actually seeing them. He had earlier evidenced some of this same ability by making contact with the owl and its talons, but here his sense is much more fully developed.

As he attains the summit, Gentry casts himself and the mountain man in nature's predator-prey relationship: “I'll make a circle inland, very quiet, and look for him like I'm some kind of animal. What kind? It doesn't matter, as long as I'm quiet and deadly. I could be a snake” (174). He thinks as the mountain man thinks—“our minds fuse” (180)—and adopts the cold “indifference” of both the man and nature. He predicts where his prey will emerge from the woods, climbs carrying bow and arrow into a tree, and, using his graphic designer's sense in a new way, creates a pattern which only the mountain man can complete. That the stranger does, in fact, enter that precise spot may at first seem an unconvincing manipulation of plot; yet Dickey clearly intends it to show how completely Ed has become nature's predator who is able to read the mind, foresee the actions, of his prey. And as the stranger steps into Ed's mechanical design, the picture becomes in a very real sense a work of art, allowing Ed to say, “I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design. I wanted to kill him just like that” (189). Gentry's shot is true, but with it he falls out of the tree and wounds himself in the side with his remaining arrow, and he has to track down the man, who has stumbled into the woods. Finding his prey dead, Ed declares, “His brain and mine unlocked and fell apart” (199); the protagonist is no longer exclusively a predator.

Whether he has killed the right man remains unclear. Ed cannot positively identify the man as his would-be sodomizer and murderer; nor can he be certain, later in the novel, that the man is the deputy sheriff's missing brother-in-law. Neither can he or the other survivors be sure, when they find Drew's body, that he has been killed by a rifle shot. Because they cannot know the truth, they decide to bury both bodies in the river and thereby avoid legal inquiries. The question of right and wrong remains, but Dickey purposely leaves it unanswered. Deliverance is not a simple morality tale of violation and revenge; it is a story of men who must learn to live with uncertainty about their own guilt or innocence. They, like the speaker in “The Firebombing,” cannot know whether they deserve absolution or sentence.

Yet in the novel, for the first time in his work, Dickey creates a figure who does achieve complete renewal. Ed Gentry outwits the authorities who await the men at the end of their canoe trip, and following a final drink of water from the river he returns to the family and the life that he feels are going to save him. However, the real salvation lies in his experiences on the river and his later appraisal of them. Ed has undergone the classic stages of survivor's guilt. He has confronted his enemy in a death encounter. He feels that he is alive because someone else has died in his place: “I had a friend there who in a way had died for me, and my enemy was there” (275). He has undergone a series of baptisms in the river and a series of exchanges helping him to merge with nature; such fusions have helped him to reorder his perspective on who and what he is. He has emerged from the fog into a renewal as a changed human being. Now he goes home to be healed and saved. Martha does help heal him physically, yet his real salvation lies within his own mind: “And so it ended, except in my mind, which changed the events more deeply into what they were, into what they meant to me alone” (274).

His deliverance alters Ed in his everyday life. He abandons his role as a “slider” and becomes instead a man with purpose. He now takes himself seriously as an artist, identifying with the office's one other serious artist: George Holley “has become my best friend, next to Lewis, and we do a lot of serious talking about art” (276). His office now displays the work of Braque as well as “headlines of war and student strikes” (276). And although Bobby returns unchanged to the “affable, faintly nasty manner he always had” (276), Lewis also learns an important lesson about himself. He discovers that “he can die now; he knows that dying is better than immortality. He is a human being, and a good one” (277). Lewis and Ed have learned how to gain real control over their lives; each now is able to become “the author of [his] own life story,”² as Lifton phrases it.

Lewis describes his archery as “passing over into Zen. … You shouldn't fight it. Better to cooperate with it. Then it'll take you there; take the arrow there” (278). His description applies also, of course, to the lives of these two men. Rather than wrestling with questions of their personal innocence or guilt, they submit to the flow of their lives as if carried by the river that now runs only in Ed's mind:

The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it—I can feel it. … In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.

(275)

The river becomes a private, haunting emblem of experiences that have transformed Ed Gentry, have delivered him into a new life.

Notes

1. Deliverance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970) 9. The page references within the text are to this edition.

2. Lifton, Home from the War 393.