[In the following review, Curran states that Dickey's To the White Sea "becomes a quest for the pure ecstasy that identification with nature will grant Muldrow."]

In the early going To the White Sea appears to be an adventure tale on the order of Deliverance. Ball-turret gunner's B-29 downed over Tokyo. The only survivor is Muldrow, a Lewis Medlock figure in wartime Japan instead of the north Georgia woods. His life as the son of a wifeless "loner of all loners" on the north face of the Brooks Range in Alaska provides the survival skills to escape from Tokyo to the northern island of Hokkaido. There he will find an environment comparable to where you encounter "cold that cleans out your insides like fire," the one he shared with Eskimos. Once again Dickey is working a variation on the stock adventure novel's structure and dynamics.

Caught initially in the thrall of what happens next, the reader connects with the survival conflict and its complications. So positioned by the conventional trappings of the escape drama, he is engaged more by the personality of Muldrow, whose Alaskan metaphysics suggest a transcendent dimension that points beyond mere physical survival. Escape in To the White Sea then becomes an opportunity to identify with the animal adaptations on the tundra and to access a form of consciousness that involves the limbic system as much as it does the higher functions of the cerebrum.

The escape-to-Hokkaido narrative soon entwines the reader's attention in the web of a far more subtle tale. This collateral narrative breathes its way into the novel like an incipient "fairy tale." To me it suggested [Conrad] Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" or [Hans Christian] Andersen's "Snow Queen." Like To the White Sea, both are journeys into kingdoms of snow and ice. In similar fashion, Dickey's novel suggests radical forms of retreat from society and the use of nature in the service of personifying states of purity, fulfillment, and transcendence. The novel's final scene portrays an ecstatic death reminiscent of the martyrdom of many Christian saints, although Dickey's perspective is purely secular.

Muldrow's predicament and the war encompassing it function more as fortuitous opportunities for an escape into nature. Their powerfully engaging concrete sides seem almost secondary. However, while the surviving gunner struggles with the logistics of his escape from the city as well as his survival in the countryside, the novel often digresses on equipment and technique more to pleasure hunters than the average reader. Its mystical element eventually supersedes the concrete struggle going on to the point that it competes with the narrative of transcendence and becomes potentially more intrusive than engaging.

Once the mystical level engages, the novel becomes a quest for the pure ecstasy that identification with nature will grant Muldrow. He can move through physical death and into a state of being beyond the corporeal. In that state human beings do not face the conventional Judeo-Christian options. Neither do they become part of the earth's memory, as Lewis Thomas conjectured shortly before his death. In Dickey's view, Muldrow becomes part of its weather immediately after identifying with a swan: "A voice in the wind: a voice without a voice, which doesn't make a sound. You can pick it up anytime it snows … or even just when the wind is from the north." How Muldrow gets to this point makes or spoils the novel. It ends with his execution in the mountains of Hokkaido. As he spins in a hailstorm of Japanese bullets, he is contained in a moment of joyous release and transformation. Having smeared himself with his own blood and that of his fellow mountain recluse, Muldrow then rolls in a pile of swan feathers. Riddled with the bullets of his pursuers like famous American criminals of the twenties and before, he recounts his last moments of life, saying: "In the wind the swan feathers fluttered on me, and I could have flown. I could have flown with the hawks and the swans."

The reader's appreciation of this final ecstatic moment relies heavily on the portrayal of Muldrow. In his development of the B-29 gunner Dickey could have shown the reader a source of human longing and transcendence that the myopia of social adaptation blurs for us all. He could have moved beyond the relational energies which bind the characters in Deliverance and which link them to the world of persons with whom they share present and future. But the main character in To the White Sea has hardly any emotional connection to anyone. He seems to be without any kinship libido whatever. Muldrow's detachment puts considerable strain on empathy. The reader must seek and love ice as much as he does: "I didn't belong anywhere, really, but above seventy degrees north." He is, in his father's words, "half snow goose and half wolverine," like a figure in the literature of the Old Southwest.

In Muldrow's pursuit of shoes, clothing, food, and invisibility, he blows people's heads off, slits throats, guts, decapitates, and, in one instance, removes and cracks the arm bone of an old man he has killed in order to smash it into splinters suitable for making sewing needles. To be squeamish about his killings seems precious—unmasculineeven—given the conditions of war and the inevitable castration and decapitation he himself faces if captured. Still, his killings, however justified, turn ugly, as he stabs an old woman who accidentally catches sight of him near a water wheel. The wheel itself gives him a notion of what to do. He saws off her head and fits it into one of the revolving buckets as it comes past him on its circular route.

Whatever his motives or state of mind, Muldrow can begin to recede as empathy erodes in the face of his schizoid character that is alienated from everything but the mountains of Hokkaido, Alaskan animals, the ice, and the snow. At times it is difficult not to adopt the attitude of his fellow gunners: "Don't fool with him." Often it is hard to determine whether he is moving toward higher levels of human consciousness on the way to self-transcendence, or if he is simply going mad. However the reader conceives of Muldrow's musings about his adaptive identifications with animals or his eventual transcendence into weather itself, the success of To the White Sea depends upon whether or not empathic identification can be fostered. If not, authentic involvement can turn into a combination of natural curiosity and frustration over Muldrow's arctic hysteria and its intrusion into an otherwise engaging tale of adventure.