SOURCE: Baughman, Ronald. “Deliverance.” In Understanding James Dickey, pp. 109-21. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Baughman explores the theme of renewal in Deliverance.

How Dickey changes and forms again is dramatically demonstrated in his only novel to date, Deliverance. In this work his protagonist achieves the renewal—the deliverance—for which the writer has struggled throughout his poetry. The speaker is able to find a new order, a new connection, a new sense of real well-being that becomes his passionate affirmation of life. Because the economy of language required in poetry does not allow for the expansive analysis that fiction provides, it is understandable that Dickey most fully develops this transforming function of survivor's guilt in his novel.

The ordeal shared by the four suburbanites who travel down the river in Deliverance clearly parallels that confronting the soldier in combat. In the first...