[In the following essay, Tapply argues that Dickey's Deliverance is among the great novels of American culture.]

When my friend Mike McGill gave me a book for my thirtieth birthday in 1970, he said, "Don't be put off by the fact that the author's a poet. I think you'll like it. It's got bowhunting and white-water canoeing in it." I devoured Deliverance. James Dickey's prose swept me along the way the river in the story carried the four men in canoes. It accelerated as I read, tossing and twisting and tumbling me so that I could no more put down the book than Ed and Lewis and Bobby and Drew could step out of their canoes in the rocky rapids of the Cahulawassee River in the middle of the Georgia wilderness. When it finally ended, I was exhausted. It had been quite a ride. I couldn't remember reading a more gripping, suspenseful story.

I was vaguely aware, even while reading it for the first time, that Deliverance explored the Important Themes that I had been taught in Mr. Cheever's high school English class—Man versus Nature, Man versus Man, Man versus Himself. I knew that I identified with the characters in ways that I had never connected to fictional men before. I liked the fact that Dickey's writing submerged itself in the story. From an award-winning poet I had expected extended, self-conscious figures of speech, convoluted symbols, fancy language. Instead I got a story so smoothly and clearly written that I was unaware of a writer at work.

It was a helluva book, and there it might have remained in my memory, one of those stories you hate to see end—but it finally does—and then you go looking for another one to read. Except soon afterwards Deliverance became a film. Dickey wrote the screenplay, and Burt Reynolds played Lewis in his finest performance (perhaps the only fine performance of his career), and I decided to try the book again.

Normally suspense stories don't work the second time around. After all, the essence of suspense lies in not knowing what's going to happen. Yet this time through the book, even with the movie's faithful story line fresh in my memory, I had to work against being swept along again on the story's momentum. I began to notice the themes and meanings that were woven so naturally into the plot that they had eluded me the first time through. And when I finished this second read, I did something I had never done before: I turned back to the first page and read it again.

And I decided that Deliverance deserved to be ranked with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as one of the great novels our culture has produced. It was not, I believed, simply a genre book, an "adventure" or a "novel of suspense," anymore than Huck Finn was a "young adult." It should be read and studied and admired—for the quality of its writing, for the insights it gives us into human nature, for the American themes it explores, for the absolute seamlessness of the story line.

Of all the books I have read, this is the one that makes me jealous. It's a perfect book. I wish I'd written it.

Deliverance, like Huck Finn one hundred years earlier, proves that great literature need not be "literary." At the beginning of his masterpiece, Mark Twain penned a caution: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." I read Huck as a kid and found it a rollicking good yarn. When I got older and reread and studied Huck, I risked the author's wrath by finding plenty of motives and morals in it.

It has always seemed to me that the morals and motives in books work best when they are so tightly entwined in the story line that we are unaware of them. But they stick with us. Most kids, with minimal prodding, can talk about what freedom meant to an abused boy and a slave, and how all of us at certain stages in our lives share Huck's and Jim's need to climb onto a raft and go floating down a river.

Go floating down a river is what the four middle-aged city men in Deliverance decide to do. All men, figuratively, long to do the same thing. Years before midlife crises became fashionable and males began to talk about "bonding," Dickey captured perfectly the angst of men at a certain age. Ed, the story's narrator, muses on his discontent:

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. How does one get through this? I asked myself. By doing something that is at hand to be done was the best answer I could give; that and not saying anything about the feeling to anyone. It was the old mortal, helpless, time-terrified human feeling, just the same.

The canoe trip is Lewis's idea. He understands how middle-aged men can find themselves sliding through life, trying to ignore their discontent, riding a placid river toward old age and death. "Sliding is living antifriction," he tells Ed. "Or, no, sliding is living by antifriction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort."

Like the Mississippi in Huck Finn, the Cahulawassee River represents a kind of freedom for the four men, a brief weekend escape from the enslavement of middle class city life, what Robert Frost called "a momentary stay against confusion." The irony in Deliverance is that the river is being dammed. Within a few years the wild valley where white water flows will be buried under a man-made reservoir. So when Lewis says they must go down the river "because it's there," he is not speaking glibly. The men must go now—while the river still flows wild—and before their lives become so "grooved with comfort" that they will be unable to get away.

The Cahulawassee, like the Mississippi in Huck, is the frontier, the "safety valve" that has left its imprint on American history and American literature. Like all frontiers, it will close. The dam—the implacable force of American civilization—will destroy the river. Man will conquer Nature.

Ed, Lewis, Drew and Bobby are not close friends. They have not "bonded." They are middle-aged men, caught up in the private, deadening sameness and high-pressure demands of their day-to-day lives. But the challenges and dangers of the river force them together—not out of comradeship, but out of necessity. "I bound myself with my brain and heart to the others," says Ed. "With them was the only way I would ever get out."

They drive from the city into the hills, leaving civilization behind, and launch their canoes. At first the river flows placidly. Occasional rapids hint at its power, and the men feel exhilarated and liberated when they conquer them. The river carries them ever deeper into the wilderness. Then a violent confrontation with two mountain men transforms the story from a white-water adventure into a life-and-death struggle. Bobby is humiliated and brutally sodomized at gunpoint, and it's clear that when the hillbillies are done with the city boys, they will murder them. Lewis stalks the mountain men as if they were deer and kills one with an arrow, while the other flees into the forest.

The four canoeists are left with the question of what to do with the dead man's body. James Dickey, like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, postulates a "state of nature," a condition without government or law. The men's dilemma forces them to consider age-old questions of right and wrong, manmade versus natural law.

Drew, who represents the voice of civilized reason, insists that they abide by man's law and "do the right thing" by bringing the body down the river with them and reporting the incident to the authorities.

"We just ought to wait a minute," replies Lewis, "before we decide to be so all-fired boy scoutish and do the right thing. There's not any right thing."

"You bet there is," says Drew. "There's only one thing … Lewis, I mean it…. This is not one of your fucking games."

"It may be the most serious kind of game there is," answers Lewis, "but if you don't see it as a game, you're missing an important point."

"I can't go along with this," insists Drew. "It's not a matter of guts; it's a matter of the law."

And Lewis, the man of nature, answers, "You see any law around here? We're the law. What we decide is going to be the way things are."

Bury the body, says Lewis, and all but Drew agree. The killing was a simple matter of survival. It was kill or be killed. Nature's law, not civilization's version of justice, applies in this wilderness. Bobby, the crudest and least sensitive of them and the victim of the incident, goes along simply because it's the only way to hide his shame. Ed, the narrator, is neither noble nor philosophical. He reduces the debate to his own self-interest. "I was ready to gamble," he tells us. "After all, I hadn't done anything but stand tied to a tree, and nobody could prove anything else, no matter what it came to. I believed Lewis could get us out. If I went along with concealing the body and we got caught it could be made to seem a matter of necessity, of simply being outvoted."

So what begins as a temporary escape from the pressures of family and business becomes an elemental struggle against the dual forces of a powerful river and a vengeful, lawless backwoodsman. Each of the four men must confront his own nature to find the limits of his strength and courage. Drew, inevitably, does not survive. The gentlest and most socialized of the four, he is shot by the surviving hillbilly from atop the cliff that borders the river. "The best of us," eulogizes Ed. "The only decent one; the only sane one." In the state of nature, Drew is the man who must die.

Lewis, on whose strength and courage the others have depended, fractures his leg when the canoe crashes in the rapids. Bobby remains weak and untrustworthy. "I ought to take this rifle and shoot the hell out of you, Bobby, you incompetent asshole, you soft city country-club man," thinks Ed.

With Drew dead, Lewis critically injured, and Bobby incompetent, it's left to Ed to save the three of them. He is an ordinary man challenged to perform extraordinarily, to climb a sheer cliff at night, to ambush an enemy on unfamiliar terrain with a primitive weapon, to steer a canoe through treacherous white water, to bring himself and his companions out alive, and to devise a coverup so that the law will not prosecute them for murder.

It's the stuff of adventure, suspense and mystery. Buried in the story's heart, however, is the complicated stuff of philosophy and religion.

When they finally return to civilization, one of the locals asks Ed, "How come you to be doing this, in the fust place?"

Ed's answer, which would have been the simple truth before the adventure, now drips with irony: "Oh," he says, "I guess we just wanted to get out a little. All of us work in the city, and it gets pretty tiresome, just sitting in an office all the time…. That's all. No really good reason, I suppose. Just boredom."

When I first read Deliverance I had not yet entered the difficult time that, I'm convinced, all men encounter at midlife, when we cannot avoid such questions as, "What does it all mean?" and "What am I doing here?" Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew are four very different men. Each confronts the conflicts and disappointments of his own life in his own way. When I was thirty, the book spoke to the midlife crises that awaited me. As I reread it through the years, I gained understanding—though no simple answers—to what I was feeling. Each of the four characters represented contradictory pieces of me.

I've given Deliverance to women of my acquaintance. They agree that it's a gripping adventure story. "But there are no significant women in it," they tell me. "It's a guy's book." Maybe they're right, although I'm tempted to point out that Moby Dick and Huck Finn and The Old Man and the Sea are, by the same standard, "guy's books."

When I taught high-school English, I asked several times for permission to assign Deliverance to my classes. "I want to study this book with my kids," I pleaded. "They'll love it. It will make them like to read. It's beautifully written, and it's important, and it's got all the themes…."

My superiors frowned. Few of them had read it. "That's the Burt Reynolds movie, right?"

"Yes. A good film. But the book's a masterpiece."

Alas. We cannot, I was told, assign high-school kids a book in which the plot pivots on a scene where a man is sodomized at gunpoint, in which the heroes "get away" with murder, in which verboten vocabulary words appear. We've got to think of our students' moral development. And what would their parents think? Better stick to Ethan Frome and The Red Badge of Courage.

I take small consolation from the fact that for years The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was widely banned from schools and libraries. I remain hopeful that one day Deliverance will be recognized as an important novel, a classic. It may not be The Great American Novel. But it is a great novel, and distinctly American.