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Colour Symbolism in James Dickey's Deliverance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
Deliverance does not at first sight appear a poet's novel. The style is colloquial, low-key, middle-class Atlanta; there is no abundance of metaphor; the clearly indicated beginning, middle and end of the action appear in that order; and no one in it seems immediately to be overburdened in the way of sensibility. Images, when they occur, are sharply delineated but not apparently freighted with hidden significance, vide:
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977
References
1 All references are to Deliverance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
2 Dickey, James, The Eye Beaters (Hamish Hamilton, 1971), pp. 47–49Google Scholar.
3 The memory that Ed takes with him on the trip is of seeing that “Martha's glasses were orange in the rising sun” (p. 35).
4 The nature of the message brought to Gentry by the owl is clearly prefigured in the third section of the poem “The Owl King,” in Drowning with Others (Wesleyan U. P., 1962)Google Scholar. Here a blind child has an experience of mystical communion with an owl, in which, through empathy and the sense of touch, his disability is cast aside:
I see as the owl king sees,
By going in deeper than darkness.
As in Deliverance, the child, overcoming his disadvantage, finds a truth in himself not otherwise to have been encountered — that in his own transfiguration he reaches the Godhead.
5 Dickey, James, Babel to Byzantium (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), p. 241Google Scholar.