Deliverance | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Deliverance Critical Overview

Critics were very impressed with Deliverance when it was published in 1970. Geoffrey Wolff, reviewing the book for Newsweek, expressed appreciation for Dickey's craftsmanship, referring to his characterization of the four men in the story as "limned flawlessly by a few broad strokes," and the book as a whole as "rich with country lore and superb lyrical evocations of the wilderness, as we should expect from Dickey." Time's reviewer praised Dickey for achieving "a small classic novel in which action and reflection are matched and a man's return to primitive produces some lasting fragment of interior knowledge." This review did find some fault with the way the novel slowed almost to a standstill, steeped in symbolism, during Ed's climb up the bluff to kill the stranger. "No single action is impossible to believe, but the accumulation—it eventually involves his singing a sort of victory song over the body and then...
(read more)