When Ed Gentry, the narrator of James Dickey's Deliverance, stands over the corpse of the man he has killed with a bow and arrow, he waits for an impulse. "It is not ever going to be known; you can do what you want to; nothing is too terrible. I can cut off the genitals he was going to use on me. Or I can cut off his head, looking straight into his open eyes. Or I can eat him." The impulse does not come, "but the ultimate horror circled me and played over the knife." Ed dispels this horror by singing a popular song. Then, "I finished, and I was withdrawn from." The horror leaves him, and he returns to the practical problem of survival.

The horror, the release of bestiality in a man whose survival is threatened by the bestiality in others, has been noted by several readers of Deliverance…. Yet the song and what it represents in the novel seem to have been ignored. Despite the obvious effectiveness of another scene involving music, the duet with Drew and the albino … no one has thoroughly considered the thematic use of the arts in the novel.

My contention is that Dickey shows art to be a necessary mediator between nature—both the exterior nature of woods and rivers and the interior nature of man's drives and dreams—and modern urban "civilized" life. Both the natural world and the civilized world have their virtues, beauties, dangers, and horrors. The positive elements of nature can be stifled by civilization; but without civilization the darker, destructive natural forces may get out of hand. Art is a product of civilization, and a civilizing force, yet for Dickey genuine art never loses touch with the primitive: in short, art embraces both Dionysus and Apollo.

Ed Gentry's uses of and responses to art provide the reader with some valuable indicators of what his experience has meant to him. (pp. 167-68)

Ed's life in the city is unsatisfying because he is "out of touch" with the primitive, Dionysian, or natural forces—except for sex, which has promise of "other things, another life, deliverance." The experiences of the journey, however, encourage him to allow other aspects of his animal nature to surface. But since these instincts arise in circumstances in which he can use them for self-defense, he is freed from feeling guilt or shame about them; and since he can exercise some control over them through art, he is enabled to keep in touch with them—again through art—when they are repressed on his return to civilization.

Some of these associations with art are foreshadowed in Dickey's presentation of Drew. Although he has been seen mainly as a spokesman for civilized values, Drew is also a genuine, if limited, artist….

Ed and his companions find themselves in a survival situation largely because of their dissatisfaction with the city. The encroachment of civilization on nature, the attempt of man to control natural forces, dominates the larger frame of the book. (p. 169)

[Lewis] seems to be obsessed with exerting a personal control over the forces of nature. He "wanted to be immortal," to control time, to perfect his body, yet he constantly put himself into confrontations with nature and got himself and others into dangerous accidents. He nurses an apocalyptic fantasy in which civilization breaks down and he has to retreat to the hills. Lewis tries to act out his fantasies, but never seems to consider the possibility of controlling or ordering nature through the artistic imagination. This failure is highlighted by the reference to his wife, who has responded to his "survival craze" by imagining a kind of art reduced to essentials "like in cave painting." (pp. 169-70)

Just as the sterile side of civilization is stressed in the episodes before the canoe trip, the positive side of nature is emphasized in the early part of the trip…. [Drew's] "woods music" characteristically links the natural with the civilized through art. (p. 170)

In order to succeed in getting the drop on the man they fear is gunning for them, Ed must cultivate [the] primitive, instinctive qualities which have been emerging. But art helps him accomplish his task by providing models and channeling these forces. The art form most frequently referred to in this most adventurous section is, as many readers have noticed, the movies.

Immediately after Lewis comes over the falls with his broken leg, Ed remarks that "the cliff looked something like a gigantic drive-in movie screen waiting for an epic film to begin." Later, evaluating their situation, he hears himself saying that they will "never get out of this gorge alive," and that the second mountaineer "means to pick the rest of us off tomorrow. Aware of the theatrical quality of his words and the remoteness of their situation from their ordinary lives, Ed says to himself, "When do the movies start, Lord?"

So far, these allusions stress the strangeness of the events: they are so improbable that one could expect them only in movies. But because of this remoteness from their real experience, the movies provide models of behavior, roles to act out that may aid them in their struggle to survive. (p. 172)

Other arts also contribute significantly to Ed's experience during the climb and the ambush. He responds to the visual beauty of the river in the moonlight, and also to his imaginative vision: "What a view. But I had my eyes closed. The river was running in my mind, and I raised my lids and saw exactly what had been the image of my thought." He describes the scene and his participation in it in terms of his visual art: around one of the rocks in the river "a thread of scarlet seemed to go, as though outlining a face, a kind of god, a layout for an ad, a sketch, an element of design…. It might have looked something like my face…. My face: why not? I can have it as I wish." Ed, unlike Lewis, exerts a kind of control over the landscape through the artistic imagination. Visual art, like the movies, also helps him plan his action: "What then, art director? Graphics consultant? What is the layout? It is this: to shoot him from behind, somewhere on the top of the gorge."

Less apparent, but perhaps more important, is a kind of skill Ed acquires during the climb that seems to link the instinctive and the artistic in Dickey's mind. Again during the climb, he thinks of Drew, who "used to say … that the best guitar players were blind men … who had developed the sense of touch beyond what a man with eyes could do. I have got something like that…. I have got up here mostly by the sense of touch, and in the dark." (p. 173)

These forces of animal instinct and human skill and art have prepared Ed for the climactic moment when he shoots the second rapist. (p. 174)

The return to civilization will demand still further use of art, this time that of realistic fiction. After the last set of rapids, Ed realizes this need and chooses the rapids as the setting of their accident. He goes over their story with Bobby: "Control, baby. It can be controlled." Art is the true control of nature and reality. As he begins to try his story on the police, his critics, he thinks: "I made it a point to try to visualize the things I was saying as though they really happened … for me they were happening as I talked." One critic, the deputy, finds a flaw in the story—what happened to the other canoe—and they have to patch it up. But Ed does so with artistic economy, adding a realistic detail: the second canoe was overloaded after the first was lost, making it easy for the last rapids to upset them and drown Drew. When the deputy challenges the story, Ed is indignant: "He was assaulting my story, which had cost me so much time and energy, and, yes, blood." But the finished product holds, and they are freed. (pp. 175-76)

And as the dam is built and civilization exerts its control on the wild river, the bestial, instinctive side of Ed's nature recedes into his subconscious:

Every night as the water rose higher, I slept better, feeling the green, darkening color crawl up the cliff, up the sides of rock, feeling for the handholds I had had, dragging itself up, until finally I slept as soundly as Drew was sleeping…. Drew and the other man were going deeper and deeper, piling fathoms and hundreds of tons of pressure and darkness on themselves, falling farther and farther out of sight, farther and farther from any influence on the living.

But the symbol of the river enables Ed to keep in touch with his experience through art. "It pleases me … that the river does not exist, and that I have it. In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality." The river replaces the model as Ed's link with the primitive forces: her gold-halved eye has left its "magic" in the night river, "the land of impossibility."

The completion of the dam also signals the closing of the frame of the novel: the human hand has controlled the river. (p. 176)

It may be possible now to stand back from Deliverance, to see it less as an ostensibly realistic narrative by Ed Gentry and more as an artifact by James Dickey the poet. The novel may then be seen as a kind of extended metaphor for the poetic process. In diving into the world of sharks, wolverines, and rapists, one is confronted with beauty, horror, and ambiguity. Art may give a kind of order to chaos, but in the ordering the artist sees the elements of chaos in more detail than other men. Just as Ed discovers beauty and horror in a situation that demands that he cultivate his inner monster, he also must impose an order on this world and control the monster. (p. 179)

[One] may think of poets like Dante, who descend into hell and return to tell us about it, thereby possibly saving us from having to make the trip ourselves. (pp. 179-80)