SOURCE: "The Savage Mind: James Dickey's Deliverance," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 69-78.

[In the following essay, Butterworth discusses the savage side of man portrayed in Dickey's Deliverance and analyzes how characterization structures the novel.]

On the dust jacket of the first edition of James Dickey's Deliverance an eye peers out through a surrounding cluster of hemlock fronds. It is not the poison hemlock shrub of Socrates, but the benign water-loving hemlock tree (Tsuga canadensis) of our Appalachian forests. It would grow in abundance, probably in virgin stands, along the Cahulawassee, the fictional river on which most of the story of Deliverance takes place. The fronds provide the screen of Nature from which the eye looks out. The eye's blue iris is the color of the sky—or of clear deep pools of water. The white ball is the color of clouds—or...