Deliverance

“We really ought to go up there before the real estate people get hold of it and make it over into one of their heavens.”

Lewis refers to the wilderness around the Cahulawassee river, which he wants to visit before it is flooded by a dam. He displays distaste for civilization and suggests that once the spot is dammed, the wilderness will be gone forever, suggesting man’s conflict with and ability to control nature.

“The way he went about things was strictly his own; that was mainly what he liked about doing them. He liked particularly to take some extremely specialized and difficult form of sport—usually one he could do by himself—and evolve a personal approach to it which he could then expound. I had been through this with him in flycasting, in archery and weight lifting and spelunking, in all of which he had developed complete mystiques. Now it was canoeing. I settled back and came out of the map.”

Ed describes some of Lewis’s key character traits—in particular, his desire for perfection and his individualism. However, Ed also suggests that despite his perfectionist approach to the activities he undertakes, he starts and then drops the activities on a whim. This foreshadows that he is not entirely prepared for the trip and does not fully understand what it will take in terms of canoeing skill. In this sense, the quotation also points to The Effects of Hubris, as Lewis’s over-confidence in his own abilities leads to disaster.

“He kept a copy of the company history on his living room coffee table at home, and the only time I ever saw him get mad was over a rival and newer company’s sales claims having to do with its drink’s weight-reducing properties. ‘Goddamned liars,’ he had said. ‘They’ve got just as many calories as we have, and we can prove it.’”

This description of Drew defines his sense of fairness and justice. He believes in telling the truth and is outraged when another company makes a false claim about their soft drinks. This foreshadows his discomfort when Lewis forces him to go along with covering up the murder of the older mountain man: Drew himself becomes a liar and displays the trait he criticizes in others.

“Lewis wanted to be immortal. He had everything that life could give, and he couldn’t make it work. And he couldn’t bear to give it up or see age take it away from him, either, because in the meantime he might be able to find what it was he wanted, the thing that must be there, and that must be subject to the will.”

Lewis’s quest for immortality is the source of his hubris and the cause of much of the damage that occurs on the canoe trip. His desire to subject nature “to his will” reveals that he is confident that he can achieve what he strives to do. In the end, the trip breaks him physically and mentally, and he no longer desires immortality.

“The rest of the studio was a large open bay with drawing boards, and I watched for a minute the gray and bald heads in their places, the shiny black ones, the curly ones and lank ones returning. I may not have had everything to do with this—with creating this—I said to myself in a silent voice that was different from my usual silent voice, but I have had something to do with it. Never before had I had such a powerful sense of being in a place I had created.”

Ed locates the source of his power in the studio, suggesting the extent to which Ed defines himself through his work. Yet it is also the routine of the work that he wishes to escape by going on the canoe trip.

“There was a peculiar spot, a kind of tan slice, in her left eye, and it hit me with, I knew right away, strong powers; it was not only recallable, but would come back of itself.”

The spot in the “Kitt’n Britches” model’s eye recurs periodically as a signifier of the wildness that Ed seeks—the thing he hopes will “deliver” him from civilization and his routine middle-class life. By the end of the novel, his experiences in the wilderness lead him to reject his fantasies about the model in favor of the reality of his wife.

“I was a mechanic of the graphic arts, and when I could get the problem to appear mechanical to me, and not the result of inspiration, I could do something with it. On this principle I had done a few big collage-things for the living room, made from torn-up posters, movie magazines, sports headlines and the like.”

Ed recognizes that he is not inspired, though he seems to seek inspiration. Instead of creating art from an inner imagination, he relies on images that are already made, suggesting that he sees the world through the lens of popular culture rather than encountering it directly; that direct encounter is part of what he hopes to find on the trip.

“The girl from the studio threw back her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha’s heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.”

Ed reflects on the meaning of the tan slice in the studio model’s eyes while making love to his wife, Martha. He does not fully understand what it means, but it suggests escape from his current life.

“My equipment, piled on the floor and dark as solid shade, laughed like Dean, and he rose up from behind it. He had a big Bowie knife in his hand, in the case.

It was odd. It was as though he both knew what the knife was and didn’t know at all, and as he waved it around and threatened me with it—with the greatest love—I was caught in the same curious dance as he, knowing what the knife would do and not believing it for a minute. Finally I took it away from him and pitched it down where he had got it, in the dark of the rest of the stuff.”

Ed’s son Dean hides in the pile of camping equipment and leaps out of it with a large knife as a joke to surprise his father. This scene not only foreshadows the backwoodsman’s attack on Ed later in the novel but also suggests the dreamlike state Ed enters when he carries a knife while hunting the man who may have shot Drew and assaulted Ed.

“I opened the door, and by that time, Lewis was already out of the station wagon, coming and coming at us. His long wolfish face was flushed, and he was grinning. He grinned continually, but other people never got the grin directly, but always just sidelong parts of it, so that there was always an evasive, confident and secret craziness in his look; it was the face of a born enthusiast. He had on an Australian bush hat with a leather chin strap, and I could not help feeling that the occasion was a good one. I picked up the bow and the camera and went out with him to the car.”

Ed’s comparison of Lewis to a wolf characterizes him as a predatory animal and is in keeping with Lewis’s description elsewhere in the novel as a hawk, a bird of prey. The description also emphasizes Lewis’s hubris. He is good at playing the part of the outdoorsman, but he may not be equal to the task he faces on this trip.

“The change was not gradual; you could have stopped the car and got out at the exact point where suburbia ended and the red-neck South began. I would like to have done that, to see what the sense of it would be. There was a motel, then a weed field, and then on both sides Clabber Girl came out of hiding, leaping onto the sides of barns, 666 and Black Draught began to swirl, and Jesus began to save. We hummed along, borne with the inverted canoe on a long tide of patent medicines and religious billboards.”

The transition from “civilization” to the “wilderness” is presented through a metaphor: The rural scenery is a tide along which the car travels. This transitional phase in the narrative marks the beginning of the descent-and-return structure of the novel, with the car’s progress along the highway marking the beginning of the “descent” into the wilderness. The billboards suggest that Ed understands the rural South through its representation in advertisements and visual images.

“‘I just believe,’ he said, ‘that the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body, once and for all. I want to be ready.’

‘What whole thing?’

‘The human race thing. 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.’”

Lewis reveals his philosophy of existence, suggesting that machines and social structures will fail, requiring humans to use their bodies to the fullest to survive in nature. The lines partially reveal the reason for Lewis’s obsessive dedication to perfecting his own body and for wanting to test his physical fitness in nature. It also suggests his hubris in thinking he can survive an apocalyptic setting, foreshadowing the damage the trip will do to his body and the bodies of others.

“‘That’s the trouble. The city’s got you where you live.’

‘Sure it does. But it’s also got you, Lewis. I hate to say this, but you put in your time playing games. I may play games, like being an art director. But I put my life and the lives of my family on the line. I have to do it, and I do it. I don’t have any dreams of a new society. I’ll take what I’ve got. I don’t read books and I don’t have theories. What’d be the use? What you’ve got is a fantasy life.’”

Lewis and Ed discuss their divergent philosophies on living (and implicitly their Conflicting Ideals of Masculinity) while they drive to Oree. Lewis introduces the issue of civilization versus nature and suggests that city living has made Ed less masculine and less vital. Ed responds by pointing out that his urban life provides him with a job and an identity, likening it to a “game” he plays to support his family; his remark implies that the struggle to survive is not confined to the wilderness and that fighting to survive in human society is one way of being a man. Ed further alleges that Lewis’s “game” is simply that—a game he plays by pretending to be an outdoorsman and a survivalist. Besides foreshadowing that Lewis is not as adept at wilderness survival as he believes, the remark undercuts his claims to “real” masculinity.

“He was broadside to me; I had shot a thousand targets one-quarter his size at the same distance, and when I recalled this—when my eyes and hands got together on it—I knew I could kill him just as easily as I could hit his outline on cardboard.”

Ed hunts the morning after their first camp in the woods. He thinks about how he has successfully hit a cardboard version of a deer from the same distance, calling attention to the relationship between images and reality. He misses the shot, suggesting that nature is harder for man to gain power over than the image of it would suggest.

“We ought to do some hard decision-making before we let ourselves in for standing trial up in these hills. We don’t know who this man is, but we know that he lived up here. He may be an escaped convict, or he may have a still, or he may be everybody in the county’s father, or brother or cousin. I can almost guarantee you that he’s got relatives all over the place. Everybody up here is kin to everybody else, in one way or another. And consider this, too: there’s a lot of resentment in these hill counties about the dam. There are going to have to be some cemeteries moved, like in the old TVA days. Things like that. These people don’t want any “furriners’ around. And I’m goddamned if I want to come back up here for shooting this guy in the back, with a jury made up of his cousins and brothers, maybe his mother and father too, for all I know.”

In the discussion of what to do with the body of the man who assaulted Bobby, Lewis argues forcefully against Drew’s idea that they should alert the authorities. Lewis references the Tennessee Valley Authority damming projects, which forced rural people to move their cemeteries, causing mass anger. By referencing both the local people’s mistrust of outside at large.

“Drew shook his head. ‘I’m telling you, I don’t want any part of it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lewis turned on him sharply and said, ‘You are part of it. You want to be honest, you want to make a clean breast, you want to do the right thing. But you haven’t got the guts to take a chance. Believe me, if we do this right we’ll go home as clean as we came. That is, if somebody doesn’t crap out.’”

The conversation about what to do with the dead mountain man’s body highlights the contrast between Drew’s societally based concept of justice and morality and Lewis’s moral relativism. Lewis believes that if they hide the dead man’s body, then it will be as if no crime was committed at all. He also emphasizes to Drew that he cannot hide his culpability in the crime through his allegiance to the laws of society. Lewis instead proposes that the natural world do the cleansing work of the conscience.

“Drew put the tense flat of his hand before my face and shook it. ‘Think what you’re doing, Ed, for God’s sake,’ he said. ‘This self-hypnotized maniac is going to get us all in jail for life, if he doesn’t get us killed. You’re a reasonable man. You’ve got a family. You’re not implicated in this unless you go along with what Lewis wants to do. Listen to reason, don’t do this thing. Ed, don’t. I’m begging you. Don’t.’”

Drew pleads with Ed not to go along with Lewis’s plan to hide the body of the dead man. He calls attention to Lewis’s hubris in thinking he can create his brand of justice. Drew also tries to appeal to Ed’s sense of social responsibility through his role as a family man. His efforts fail, suggesting that his commitment to the law has no place in the wild.

“The river whirled the paddle from Drew’s hand as though it had never been there. His right arm shot straight out, and he followed it, turning the whole canoe with him.”

The description of Drew’s fall from the canoe personifies the river and emphasizes that the true cause of Drew’s fall is unknown. The positioning of the river as the sentence’s subject suggests that it, not a shooter, is responsible for Drew’s fall, underscoring the role the natural world plays in his death.

“What I mean is like they say in the movies, especially on Saturday afternoon. It’s either him or us. We’ve killed a man. So has he. Whoever gets out depends on who kills who. It’s just that simple.”

Ed’s statements mark a key transition point for his character, after which he takes on the leadership role from the injured Lewis. Yet he does not fully feel his role as a hunter of men, as evinced by the movies he references to frame the reality that he must kill the man who he thinks killed Drew.

“‘I’m staking my life on being right. Lewis would do it. Now I’m going to have to. Let me get going.’

‘Listen,’ Bobby said, grabbing at me weakly, ‘I can’t do it. I won’t make a sitting duck out of myself so you can go off in the woods and leave us to be shot down. I can’t. I just can’t.’

‘Listen, you son of a bitch. If you want to go up that cliff, you go right ahead. There it is; it’s not going away. But if I go up it we’re going to play this my way. And I swear to God that if you don’t do exactly what I say I’ll kill you myself. It’s just that goddamned simple. And if you leave Lewis on this rock I’ll do the same thing.’”

Ed takes over the role of hunter from Lewis and assumes a new role in the novel. Bobby, in keeping with his feminized position in the narrative, cannot physically stop Ed from climbing the cliff to hunt the man they believe shot Drew. Ed fully takes on the killer’s role when he threatens to kill Bobby if he does not do what he is told, suggesting that Ed is transforming into a predator like Lewis.

“Then I would begin to try to inch upward again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman. Fear and a kind of enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me, millimeter by millimeter. And yet I held madly to the human. I looked for a slice of gold like the model’s in the river: some kind of freckle, something lovable, in the huge serpent-shape of light.”

In this pivotal moment before the climactic moment in which Ed becomes a killer, Ed seems to make love to nature, trying to become one with it. Yet he cannot fully humanize the natural world. It is too alien—not something he can love or feel for. The serpent reference suggests the danger inherent in nature by alluding to the biblical garden of Eden, in which the serpent is Satan, a figure of evil.

“I crawled over to him and picked up the knife. I put it in his mouth and pried at the gums, and a partial upper plate began to come out. Did that make the difference? Did that make enough difference? I shoved the teeth back in with the handle of the knife, and took a good look. He was dressed like the toothless man in the clearing; whether exactly like him I truthfully couldn’t say, but very much like. He was about the same size, and he was thin and repulsive-looking. And, though my time close to him in the clearing was burned in my mind, I had still seen him under those circumstances, which were a lot different from these; I believe that if I could have seen him move I would have known, one way or the other. But I didn’t, and I don’t.”

Ed has reached a crisis point, but his apotheosis is complicated by the fact that he does not know whether the man he has killed is the man who attempted to assault him and later shot Drew. Ed has a remembered image of the man; he had no upper teeth, whereas the man Ed has killed wears false teeth. He admits that in hindsight he does not know whether he killed the “right” person.

“For a long time I went through both daily papers from column to column every day, but only once did the word Cahulawassee come off the page at me, and that was when the dam at Aintry was completed. The governor dedicated it, there was a ceremony with college and high school bands, and the governor was said to have made a very good speech about the benefits, mainly electrical and industrial, that the dam would bring to the area, and touching on the recreational facilities that would be available when the lake filled in. 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 deeply as Drew was sleeping. Only a few days after I saw the story in the paper I knew that the grave of the man we had buried in the woods was under water, and from the beginning of the inundation 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.”

Ed begins to realize that the bodies of the two men are forever hidden by nature, but also by the return to civilization, here symbolized by the dam that floods the area. The motif of sleep suggests death, as Drew and the two dead men sink deeper and deeper into the depths of the water from the dam.