Deliverance (novel)

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Deliverance

Author	James Dickey
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publication date	1970
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 978-0385313872

Deliverance is a 1970 novel by James Dickey, his first. It was adapted into a 1972 film by director John Boorman. In 1998, the editors of the Modern Library selected Deliverance as #42 on their list of the 100 best 20th-Century novels.

[edit] Plot

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Told in first-person in heavily poetic language by one of the main characters, graphic artist Ed Gentry, the novel begins with four middle-aged residents of a large Georgia city planning a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the north Georgia wilderness, before it is flooded over by the upcoming construction of a dam and lake. Three of the men--Ed, insurance salesman Bobby Trippe, and soft drink executive Drew Ballinger--are conventional white-collar workers who are at least superficially comfortable with their lives, although Ed shows signs of a vague dissatisfaction with his own routines. The fourth, Lewis Medlock, is an outdoorsman who yearns to transcend his own claustrophobic existence as a landlord and who is the driving force behind the canoe trip.

On Friday September 14th (a date corresponding to the calendar of 1962, though the year is never given; however, late in the novel there is a reference to the Kennedy assassination, which occurred in 1963, negating 1962 as a possibility), the men drive two cars, each laden with a canoe, into the Georgia mountains, arriving at the fictitious village of Oree. During the drive, Lewis relates to Ed in some detail his aversion to comfortable city life, his idealization of rural mountain dwellers, and his desire to hone his survival skills. "I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over," he tells Ed. At the same time, however, some of the stories he tells Ed of his prior experiences in the mountains, including one episode in which he broke his ankle in the deep woods, foreshadow that he may not be as ready for the wilderness as his demeanor suggests. Ed, by contrast, though enjoying his friendship with Lewis, protests (in spite of earlier indications to the contrary) that he himself is quite comfortable with his own urban life and is being a bit indulgent of Lewis by going on this canoe trip.

At a gas station in Oree, Drew, a guitarsman, plays a duet with Lonnie, a banjo-playing, mentally deficient albino boy who is apparently a musical savant. (This scene is the basis for the more intense and adversarial scene in the film featuring the famous song "Dueling Banjos".) Nevertheless, the appearance of Lonnie and other hillbillies emphasizes the different nature of the society into which the city dwellers have now passed; in a sense they are trespassers in the mountains, and not very welcome ones.

After arranging with some local mechanics, the rough and forbidding Griner brothers, to drive the foursome's cars down to the fictitious town of Aintry, where the canoe voyage will end two days later, the men put into the river and begin their journey. After they shoot some initial rapids and the evening approaches, Ed begins to reflect on the isolation into which the group has now voyaged. "It was beginning to be very wild and quiet. I remembered to be frightened and right away I was. It was the beautiful impersonality of the place that struck me the hardest; I would not have believed that it could hit me all at once like this, or with such force. The silence and the silence-sound of the river had nothing to do with any of us."

That night, as the men make camp, the river seems to have cast its spell upon all of them; Drew and Bobby agree that they were right to have come on the journey, and as Ed lies in his tent he sees the talons of a large owl pierce the canvas as the bird perches all night to hunt from the tent.

The following morning, Ed awakens early and goes hunting with his bow and arrow. Sighting a deer, he shoots but misses, later explaining to Lewis that he broke psychologically at the last moment. Lewis expresses disappointment, and Ed grows a bit irritated at his friend's survivalist mentality. After breaking camp, Ed and Bobby then set out in one of the canoes slightly ahead of Lewis and Drew. After spending a night in the camp, Bobby has changed his mind about the outing and is chafing at Lewis's directions, so Ed takes him on as a canoe partner to keep the two apart.

Later in the day, after Ed and Bobby land to rest, two mountain men, one of them carrying a shotgun, step out of the woods and accost them. Feeling vaguely threatened, Ed takes them for moonshiners or escaped convicts. When one of them asks if Ed and Bobby are traveling alone, Ed answers yes to prevent them from ambushing the others and hoping that Lewis will be able to rescue them if they need it.

Ed's fears turn out to be right, and the men now force him and Bobby into the woods, tying Ed to a tree and cutting him with his own knife; then, in the book's and film's most famous scene, one of the mountain men sodomizes Bobby. Afterwards, the men untie Ed, and the other mountain man, handing his partner the shotgun, prepares to force Ed to perform oral sex on him. At the moment of the shotgun transfer, Ed hears the twang of a bow as Lewis, hidden in the woods, shoots Bobby's assailant. Ed wrestles the gun away from the other man, and watches as the shot hillbilly slowly dies.

There follows a heated discussion about what to do. Lewis, who seems to be actually enjoying what is happening, wants to bury the body, arguing that if they report what has happened they might be put on trial in front of a jury consisting of the dead man's relatives; one way or another, he points out, they would "be connected to this man, this body, for the rest of our lives." Once the lake covers the grave, he declares, no one will be able to find it. In this he is opposed by Drew, who now becomes the group's chief representative of "civilized" values and argues that the men must take the body with them to Aintry and report what has happened. Lewis dismisses this as "boy scoutish" and "the conventional point of view." Drew proclaims that he wants no part of what is happening; Lewis states that Drew is part of it, but that the men can get out of it with no questions asked if nobody loses his nerve. "It's not a matter of guts," answers Drew, "it's a matter of the law." To this Lewis retorts "You see any law around here? . . . We're the law. . . . So let's vote on it." Bobby, who has in the meantime viciously kicked the corpse in the face, sides with Lewis, leaving Ed as the deciding vote. In a moment that fully (re)defines his character, Ed ignores Drew's pleas and takes a gamble that Lewis's way is best, siding with him.

The men bury the body and take to their canoes, with Ed and Drew now teamed up. As evening begins to come on they enter a high gorge with powerful rapids, and as Ed calls out to Drew for more speed, a puff of air ruffles Drew's hair and Drew loses control of the canoe, and the two men spill into the rapids, followed by Lewis and Bobby as they hit the first canoe. Drew disappears, Lewis emerges with a badly broken leg, and the three remaining members of the group drag themselves onto a rock. Lewis declares that Drew was shot.

Ed is less certain, but he realizes that if the mountain man is indeed at the top of the gorge, he can shoot them all if they take to the river again--that in fact they were lucky that they spilled and spoiled his aim. Lewis is in no condition to do anything about it, and Bobby has become a twisted image of Drew. If Drew represented the best of civilization, Bobby, now an indecisive weakling with a victim's mentality, represents the worst. Leadership of the group thus falls to Ed, who decides he must climb the cliff to the top of the gorge and kill the mountain man with his bow.

Ed briefs Bobby carefully about taking Lewis downriver in the remaining canoe at first light in order to avoid being shot. Bobby weakly protests about the possibility that he would be a sitting duck on the river. "Listen, you son of a bitch," replies Ed, "If you want to go up that cliff, you go right ahead. . . . But if I go up it we're going to play this my way." If Bobby doesn't follow the plan exactly, Ed warns him, "I'll kill you myself."

Ed then makes the grueling climb to the top of the gorge and scouts for the rifleman's likely firing position; climbing a tree, he sets up for a shot. Early the following morning, the rifleman appears, and as he spots the tree in which Ed is hidden, Ed shoots him. The rifleman fires at almost the same time. The return fire, though missing Ed, knocks him from the tree, and he is gored in the side by one of his own arrows as he hits the ground. He then tracks the rifleman and finds his dead body in a small clearing. He returns the body to the top of the cliff. As he does, he sees the canoe with Lewis and Bobby in it moving out into the river in the full light. "You're dead, Lewis," Ed says to himself. "You and Bobby are dead. You didn't start on time; you did everything wrong. I ought to take this rifle and shoot the hell out of you, Bobby . . . you soft city country-club man." He then picks up the rifle and aims at Bobby's chest, but then puts it down, knowing that "it had been close; very close." Ed has now become what Lewis has wanted to be but lacks the skill to become; a hardened survivor, free of the city in every way, to the degree that he feels nothing in common with Bobby or even Lewis. This scene may be related to the book's epigraph, a passage from the book of Obadiah: "The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwelleth in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?" (On the other hand, the epigraph may be speaking to the city-dwellers as a group.)

Ed then lowers the body down the cliff and descends the rope himself, but it is not long enough to reach to the bottom. As Ed climbs down it breaks, and he and the corpse fall into the river. After Ed castigates Bobby for not following his plans and brushes aside his excuses, the pair weight the corpse and sink it into the deepest part of the river. Ed, Bobby, and the badly injured Lewis then continue the journey in the remaining canoe.

Below the gorge, they find Drew's body. Lewis, though in a bad way, examines his head and confirms that it had been grazed by a rifle bullet. Ed and Bobby then sink Drew's body, too, into the river, since they cannot allow medical examiners to see the wound. Again Ed threatens Bobby with death in order to get him to overcome his exhaustion and help. As they sink Drew's body, Ed proclaims that "You were the best of us, Drew . . . the only decent one; the only sane one."

Some time later, the men arrive at Aintry, where they explain that they have suffered a canoing accident. After a doctor stiches up Ed's wound, he and Bobby eat in a boarding house, but Ed then goes to the basement and takes a long shower in river water, a scene showing his new visceral connection with the wilderness.

Ed and Bobby believe that they have their story straight--Lewis feigns having few memories of the "accident" and thus escaping questioning--but then the sheriff locates a piece of the shattered canoe above the point where they claimed to have had the accident and they have to modify their story quickly. Nevertheless, one deputy sheriff grows highly suspicious of them and tells the sheriff that his brother-in-law has been missing since the weekend, believing Ed, Bobby, and Lewis to have something to do with it. Nevertheless, the sheriff lets them go, with a warning not to return to Aintry.

Ed returns to his city life, though changed, feeling a continuing connection with the river, which in reality has now ceased to exist with the dam's completion. He occasionally sees Bobby before the latter, his business failing, moves to Hawaii, but has little to do with him--"he would always look like dead weight and like screaming, and that was no good to me." Ed and his wife later buy a cabin on another dammed lake and Lewis, now with a permanent limp, buys a neighboring cottage. The novel ends by relapsing into the conventional patterns of city dwellers, almost as if nothing has changed . . . except for Ed's connection with the now-drowned river, which has made the rest of his conventional life tolerable.