Leonard Lutwack, in Heroic Fiction, has stated that Melville's Moby-Dick introduced "unequivocally the spirit of the epic to American fiction by daring to endow native materials with qualities of the heroic past."… James Dickey's Deliverance … fits the ancient pattern more closely than any of the novels Lutwack chooses to discuss (it seems, in fact, an almost perfect embodiment of Joseph Campbell's "monomyth"). (p. 128)

In a time when the suspicion begins to grow, as Mailer puts it, that "nothing is nailed down" or, as Lewis puts it, that "nothing 'stays put,'" Dickey would take us back across time to the time before man had a sense of history but did, instead, take "for granted" his place in the natural cycle of birth and death. The country people in Deliverance seem grotesque and simple-minded to city people like Bobby, Drew, and Ed, but Lewis Medlock tells Ed that "we're lesser men" … than they, because they live the kind of natural existence that city-bound men have lost over the civilized centuries.

Lewis Medlock is cut from the mold of the "primitive" epic hero, the champion of a "less sophisticated way of life" who is as ready to "plunge outside of history" as Ellison's Tod Clifton. As Odysseus was the man "never at a loss," Lewis is, according to the narrator Ed Gentry, "the only man I knew who could do with his life exactly what he wanted to."… "He was not only self-determined; he was determined." The obligatory epic description of his "prowess" reads: "He was one of the best tournament archers in the state and, even at the age of thirty-eight or -nine, one of the strongest men I had ever shaken hands with."… Ed Gentry, the quintessential contemporary American, a soft and overweight suburbanite, finds himself nonetheless "of the chosen" … of Lewis. If this is not exactly the honor of being chosen by Odysseus to man the voyage to Ithaca, it is at least as good as being asked by Papa himself to join him on the "tragic adventure" of fishing the swamp on the big two-hearted river. And since Lewis's river happens to flow through just such a dreaded underworld, his weekend canoe trip takes on an epical significance demanding an American-bred heroism that is at least Hemingwayesque, if not Homeric.

The tragedies and triumphs of Homeric epic, according to C. S. Lewis, were played against a "background of meaningless flux," played against the sense of the "permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is."… The action of Deliverance is played against the Homeric background. As Ed says in a moment of revelation during his climb up the side of the cliff, "The river was blank and mindless with beauty…. 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 moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence."… The experience of Deliverance is a return in time (symbolized by the line Ed describes between the urban South and rural South …) to pre-Christian era to match that of our "post-Christian America" (Saul Bellow's phrase, Herzog), a return to a time much like our own when values were grabbed on the run and meaning was where you found it, to a time when the hero's role was not diminished by the indifference of the cosmos to his actions but heightened thereby because heroism was all. The final difference between meaning and meaninglessness was the hero's ability, versus his inability, to act when the necessary time came (Mailer's "existential edge"). This is the nature of Ed's discovery after undergoing an initiation rite into heroism on the death climb up the cliff: in an indifferent universe governed by no laws except natural forces (the metaphor of which Ed sees in the running of the river …) "Who knows what might not be possible?" (pp. 129-31)

Deliverance is something other than just an epic; it is a Bildungsroman, a novel of Ed Gentry's education, playing Telemachus to Lewis's Odysseus, in the mysteries of heroism. Ed begins by being amused by Lewis's atavistic faith in the body as the ultimate source of human survival….

In a cerebral society in which all bodily functions have been reduced to a complex of sublimations, and a dominant male threatens other submissive males with transfer to the branch office in Juneau rather than with physical harm, vanity is perhaps the principal reason a man can have for developing his muscles. But while society may nurture narcissism …, the wilderness teaches humility; a man of the wilderness develops his body as a hedge against its proven vulnerability. (p. 132)

Hemingway dead by his own hand, Gatsby the victim of the "foul dust" of industrial society that "floated in the wake of his dreams"; these are the real-life and fictional embodiments of the American frontier spirit, reverse-scapegoats fighting not for the chance to "light out for the territory" but against the social mechanisms that threaten to cut off the individual from his last lingering sense of source. As Lewis teaches Ed, a man must never let his social role obscure his natural identity…. (p. 133)

The would-be contemporary American epic hero must learn first of all that his own life can have epic or mythic implications, but only if he bears the responsibility for his own deliverance that he would rather leave on the stronger shoulders of Odysseus, Victor Mature, or Lewis Medlock: "The assurance with which he had killed a man was desperately frightening to me," Ed says of Lewis, "but the same quality was also calming, and I moved, without being completely aware of movement, nearer to him. I would have liked nothing better than to touch that big relaxed forearm…. I would have followed him anywhere…."… Now Ed finds himself miscast as the epic hero in a classically defined kill-or-be-killed confrontation, and the thought makes his "tongue thicken at the possibility."… (pp. 135-36)

Dickey uses archery to dramatize, and symbolize, the epic struggle of mind to master matter and of will to master fear. The arrow becomes the extension of the hero's will, and the rightness of its flight to the target mirrors the straightness of the archer's mind. (p. 136)

Lewis stands at full draw for a full minute, a demanding situation for an archer because the steadiness of his aim ebbs away with his strength, waiting for the right moment to shoot the man holding the shotgun on Ed. The man, of course, is "center shot." We expect this steadiness and psychological "cool" from Lewis, as the ancients expected it from Odysseus, who made his incredible shot through the axe heads, Homer tells us, having never bothered to get up from his banquet seat. But we do not know what to expect from Ed, the "dumb brute" common man, when his time comes. This is the essence of the American epic: Will the common man, given his opportunity for deliverance, be able to conquer the hysteria that stalks us all? The reader is apprehensive because earlier Ed had "exploded … high and wide" … when he tried to shoot a deer. With this scene in mind, the reader waits for Ed's resolve to fail. It does, at his first glimpse of the mountain man, and pity and fear flood the hearts of all those readers in suburbia who suspect the same deeply rooted cowardice in themselves…. (pp. 136-37)

Dickey's use of the archery shot as the symbol and dramatization of the hero's balance of body and mind, instinct and intellect, that signals his resonance with the forces of nature is reminiscent of another American contribution to the mystique of epic heroism, that of Fenimore Cooper's frontier scout, Natty Bumppo…. Lewis would seem to have the same moral affinity with natural forces that made Natty so invincible. (pp. 138-39)

Ed's "grace under pressure" when the time comes that he must hit his target, or die for missing, is surely meant to signify his achievement of the moral secret of "true aim." During his climb up the cliff he undergoes the renewal of his basic instincts and achieves the return of his unconscious to its physical source. (p. 139)

The real climax of the story occurs when Ed purifies his body enough to gain the capacity to discover or possibly to create the crevice which saves his life; in ecstasy he declares, "I had both hands in the cliff to the palms, and strength from the stone flowed into me."… This may sound like mysticism, but its truth is attested to by such observers of the human being in combat as Robert Graves and Erich Maria Remarque. (p. 140)

For Ed the purification of the body leads to a purification of the mind, which is demonstrated by his discovery that "the river was running in my mind, and I raised my lids and saw exactly what had been the image of my thought."… The secret strength of the hero is now his. His body has brought his mind into touch with nature's ways. His understanding of the human situation is now in balance with the existential reality of natural law. His aspirations are running in harmony with his expectations. His once fear-ridden imagination … is vibrating in concert with the way things are. And his nerves steady with the realization that human actions were never intended to matter very much, that there are no eternal cosmic repercussions, only momentary thrashings about. His mood comes to reflect the all-pervasive tone of the universe that he had seen reflected in the river: "It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me: an indifference not only to the other man's body scrambling and kicking on the ground with an arrow through it, but also to mine."… (p. 141)

Dickey takes his epigraph from [an] Old Testament prophet, Obadiah: "The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?" (Obadiah 3, KJV). Critics have wondered if Dickey meant this as a condemnation of the mountain men or of Ed and Lewis. But Dickey does not mean this as a condemnation at all but as a formula for salvation, the lesson of humility leading the man who learns it to "Mount Zion," infinitely higher than the highest human habitation, where, according to Obadiah, "shall be deliverance."… (p. 142)

Perhaps Dickey's choice of epigraph serves as a warning that Lewis's mystique is not as pure as it should be. "Lewis wanted to be immortal," Ed tells us in the beginning, but by the end, having resisted the pull of the river and having been wounded for it, Lewis learns that "he can die now; he knows that dying is better than immortality."… With this knowledge Lewis can return to his society and, like Nebuchadnezzar, live at peace with it. There is no longer any desperate need to "light out for the territory." He can sit by the man-made lake with Ed watching the water skiers, secure in his hard-won feeling for "the true weight and purpose of all water."… (pp. 142-43)

Lewis and Ed have learned the indifference to their own lives which is the secret to putting one's body and mind in touch with all life, that is the secret of the hero's power to save lives and to make this salvation the way to a life more abundant. They have learned that deliverance lies downriver, that a man has only to give himself up to the primal pull of natural forces. So, Ed concludes, "Let the river run."… (p. 143)