SOURCE: Baughman, Ronald. “James Dickey's Alnilam: Toward a True Center Point.” South Carolina Review 26, no. 2 (spring 1994): 173-79.

In the following essay, Baughman examines the symbolic meaning of the settings in Alnilam.

James Dickey's second novel, Alnilam, concentrates on three major settings that serve as symbolic constructs within which the principal character pursues transformations in his life. The first setting, an Atlanta amusement park that Frank Cahill, the novel's protagonist, builds as a perverse version of the Garden of Eden, illustrates his fall from or rejection of human society—of family or other human relationships. The second setting, an Army Air Corps training base during the early years of World War II, where Frank searches for information about the fate of his only son, is yet another closed environment, but one in which a highly organized group of air cadets endeavor to ascend beyond the realm of ordinary human...