SOURCE: Schmitt, Ronald. “Transformations of the Hero in James Dickey's Deliverance.” James Dickey Newsletter 8, no. 1 (fall 1991): 9-16.

In the following essay, Schmitt maintains that Dickey provides an ironic treatment of the mythical hero in his novel Deliverance.

According to James Dickey himself, the source of the novel Deliverance was a 1949 review essay in the Kenyon Review by Stanley Edgar Hyman which mentions both Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces and Arnold Van Gennep's Les Rites de Passage (Eisiminger 53). According to Hyman, “… as students of myth we must separate from the world, penetrate to a source of knowledge, and return with whatever power of life-enhancement the truth may contain” (qtd. in Eisiminger 53). Dickey himself documents his interest in myth and its importance to modern man:

The parts of the universe we can investigate by means of machinery and scientific empirical techniques we may understand better than our predecessors...