Perhaps [the patterned brutality in Deliverance] is nothing more than a macabre symmetry, a grimly humorous instance of "poetic justice," in which each of the perverted primitives gets what he deserves where he deserves it. But there is something more; the neatly ironic balancing of sin and retribution, of crime and counter-crime, is transcended by the mystery formed between the civilized hunter and the primitive one. What results from this whirlwind weekend courtship with death is love. (p. 204)

There are perversion and fantasy present in [the love scene between Gentry and his wife, a] scene of "civilized" love: it has one other important element in common with the climactic hunt—dreams and dreaming. For night (with its fantasies, inversions, dreams) constitutes the "atmosphere" of both the love-episode and the hunt-episode. Indeed, the scene that describes Gentry's embrace of his wife opens with his musing upon dreams…. Gentry defines wakening as the attempt to "get clear of" where he had been. Dreaming becomes another vehicle to illustrate his struggle to escape death and find "another life." Gentry's definition of dreaming takes us out of the bedroom and into the wilderness, out of the love-scene and into the hunt. And the dream ends in each episode with deliverance. A close look at that hunt furnishes the perspective needed to view this collage of night, dream, fantasy, and perversion.

The hunting episode begins with Gentry's climbing a steep gorge to reach the cliff where he suspects the bushwacker is hiding. This scene, too, begins with a dream. In fact, the whole episode might be called a dream sequence. Gentry's stalking of the backwoodsman begins just before dawn, as does the bedroom scene, and his difficult climb is reminiscent of the "dragged upward" sensation he always experiences in his attempts to struggle free of his dreams…. The sexuality becomes clearer as the hunt proceeds. "Then I would begin to try to inch upward again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman. Fear and a kind of enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me."…

This hunt is a primal union with "mother nature," the intimacy of which is greater than marriage. And, as in the love-scene, something obtrudes upon his intimacy with his wife. But the strongest link between this passage and the earlier episode is the fact that Gentry manages to climb out of his dream and up the rock-face to eventual deliverance because an "enormous moon-blazing sexuality" lifted him beyond the abyss.

Gentry's sense of suspension during the climb strongly resembles that of the dream state. And, as in a dream, his thoughts during the hunt are a kind of fantasy. He thinks of his deadly accurate plan to trap the hunter as a daydream; indeed, the whole situation has the finality and matter-of-factness that dreams give to extraordinary events…. Sex, as well as murder, is the object of Ed Gentry's fantasy, of his "wet dream." (pp. 205-06)

The hunt, itself, is clearly sexual in [D. H. Lawrence's short novel] The Fox, perhaps less so in Deliverance. Dickey's use of sexuality in the hunt is subtle, but it is there: "We were closed together, and the feeling of a peculiar kind of intimacy increased," says Gentry…. And as he lined the woodsman up in his sights, he noted that "There was something relaxed and enjoying in his body position, something primally graceful; I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design. I wanted to kill him just like that…. Wait till he lies down, I said far back in my throat."… Finally, this chase ends in a whirlwind climax in which both hunters, feeling a sudden blast and finding themselves turning and twisting and falling, perform a macabre parody of sexual union.

The hunt, then, is a sexual one in Deliverance. But to end with this observation is to miss Dickey's point—and Lawrence's…. Lawrence's is the more explicit: … "He was a huntsman in spirit…. And it was as a young hunter that he wanted to bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife."… The hunt is sexual, but the point of it is to bring love out of the perverseness of man's desire, to bring another life out of the quarry's death. Gentry's kill is no dodge of cleverness. But only gradually does it become clear that love is involved in the slaying of the woodsman. Dickey quietly injects the possibility of love into the chase when he slips into Gentry's mind the observation that "If Lewis had not shot his companion, he [the man he is tracking] and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods."…

The sexuality in the hunt is a function of the fantasy in the hunt. The fantasy dictates that he shoot the hillbilly in the back, as, earlier, he took his wife in the "back," and as the older backwoodsman got Trippe in the "back."… When fantasy ends reality takes over: the arrow pierces the mountaineer's throat and not his back. (pp. 207-08)

Earlier, Gentry regretfully noted that the hunted hunters could have "made a kind of love," could have "been together in the flesh." Yet, they do become one: each inflicts a wound in the other at the same moment, and their blood flows and mingles together just as their minds "merged" and "fused" during the chase. At the height of that climax both sex and death are transcended. They become "one flesh"—but not in the manner Gentry has fantasized…. Gentry escaped the backwoodsman's sexual fantasy, and he eludes Gentry's. The novel's treatment of sexuality makes the point that, like hunting, sex is a deadly struggle. But Dickey's treatment of hunting and sexuality indicate that love can result from the battle.

When now we return to Gentry's "struggle" with his wife, we can appreciate the function of dream and fantasy in that love-scene from the perspectives furnished by the hunt. Gentry's catching sight of his quarry's face turns the scene from exploitation to identification, from rape to love. The same thing occurs at the climax of Gentry's embrace of his wife…. Gentry's fantasy-girl does not usurp his wife, for the sudden reality of the girl's face (both during the photography session and the love session) and the "otherness" of her golden eye cause the unnatural and potentially exploitive fantasy to dissolve and become a genuine act of love.

Although Dickey clearly rejects the fantasy element, he does not dismiss the entire dream experience. In fact, the dream situation, when taken as a whole (all that precedes the climax both in the love-scene and in the hunt-scene), predicts and creates the essential truth in each experience. Life is like a dream, suggests Dickey, but each dream contains omens and illusions. The two major episodes in Deliverance are constructed as dream sequences. The illusion in each is precisely the same: Gentry's fantasy of sodomy and the power and pleasure it promises. The truth in each dream is similar: the "promise of … another life, deliverance."… The fantasy promises pleasure and power, but is death; the omen promises struggle, and yields new life.

Life is like a dream. Yet we can never distinguish between truth and illusion until the dream comes to its climax and we waken. The novel tells us that we are condemned to feeling our way in the dark, to finding truth through dreams like Penelope in the Odyssey. Defenseless, unable to touch or make contact with our own environment, surrounded by hypocrites, we live in a world of shadows and half-lights. By definition, mortals cannot distinguish between the dream and the fantasy; but when dawn ends and day triumphs in its primal struggle with night, then mortals may know the truth. And, in Deliverance, the dreams do occur at dawn, just as in the Odyssey. (pp. 208-10)

If we say that the backwoodsman and the city-boy come together at the climax of the struggle, that in their identification the hillbilly becomes Gentry's "double," then what dies there is Gentry's other self. He has killed the predator in him by becoming a predator. Gentry has shucked off that part of himself that might kill or rape anything that turns its back on him. He becomes truly civilized by destroying the slackjaw hillbilly in himself. Thus, the death of the back-woodsman is not wanton exploitation: it is "in some dreadful way" a creation of something new—Gentry's freedom and love. (pp. 210-11)

The climax of the hunt (and the novel) is a kind of liebestod. It displays a union of the primal tensions of human existence, just as the dawn displays the brief union of night and day. Love and death are identified, and as inextricable as day from night or the hunter from his quarry. But Dickey's romance does not end with this liebestod. His conception of romance differs from the fin-de-siècle European version by being at once much tougher and more optimistic.

Dickey is not a decadent. The hunt may have its esthetics, but it is also a philosophy: the display of paradox and antithesis must be productive. And here again the sexuality in the novel furnishes some clarity. In Deliverance, love is the point; sodomy is the exaggeration that makes the point—sex as an end in itself is a dead end. Sodomy is a vicious exploitation, here, in which (biologically as well as ethically) "another life" cannot be produced. But if the minds "merge" and "fuse" and the eyes make contact and see, then the partners can be "together in the flesh." This merging happens to Gentry in bed with his wife and in the wilderness with the backwoodsman. If love is not brought out of the climax, if the miracle is not delivered out of the muddle, then the liebestod becomes a "mind-rape."

But what does the book say about sex apart from its function as a metaphor? I think Dickey is saying that sex is the energy that shapes all life…. (p. 212)