SOURCE: Hassan, Ihab. “The Spirit of Quest in Contemporary American Letters.” In Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades, pp. 187-207. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995..

In the following excerpt, Hassan contrasts the two main characters—Ed and Lewis—in Dickey's novel Deliverance.

In contrast to Bellow's and Mailer's fictions, James Dickey's Deliverance (1970) seems less a quest than a brutal tale of survival. The reader may wonder: deliverance from what? From moral complacencies, social pieties, perhaps from civilization itself? The clues are scattered, and in one place they become nearly explicit. Making love to his wife on the morning of his fateful adventure, the narrator, Ed Gentry, imagines—he is on the whole steady, unimaginative—the golden eye of a girl, a studio model: “The gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things...