SOURCE: "Dickey's 'Deliverance': Sex and the Great Outdoors," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. IX, No. 2, Spring, 1977, pp. 137-49.

{In the following essay, Langen describes sex as a primal source of power that pervades James Dickey's novel Deliverance.

The homosexual rape scene in James Dickey's Deliverance is stunningly crude and unforgettable. It is hard not to think of this act of sex when we think of the novel in general—and this seems precisely Dickey's intent. But the sexual episode with the mountain men, with all its brutality and violence, is not simply the first in a twenty-four-hour series of nightmare adventures. It is part of the pervasive theme of sex which Dickey uses to convey an understanding of what life in the so-called great outdoors—or anywhere—is all about when the chips are down. It means that once the superstructure of courtesy, of convention, of ethics...