Ordeal and deliverance: a comparative study of the fiction of Walker P. Percy and James Dickey

Date

1975

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Abstract

An examination of ordeals and their consequences in James Dickey's Deliverance and Walker Percy's novels reveals that, although both authors emphasize death, pain, and danger as avenues to intensified reality, they depict radically different deliverances through ordeal. Percy's bereaved characters discover their need to help others and be helped by them in turn, and from grief, weakness, and pain they build a strength based on mutual support. Their search for aid does not stop at the human level: Percy's novels suggest, and Love in the Ruins stresses, a development of religious faith through pain and contact with death. Also, Percy's people find another mode of salvation in their ability to combine humor with despair. In contrast, Dickey's Ed Gentry achieves a bitterly ironic deliverance that partly derives from an unleashed inner bestial strength. On the river Ed abandons his regular social roles and also his conscience, as personified by Drew. Out of bestiality and a sense of godlike authority to create and destroy, Ed then fashions a new role, that of "born killer." His physical survival at the expense of another's life is far removed from Percy's world of characters who can neither kill others nor themselves.

Description

Keywords

Citation