The writing style really bothered me - it was almost like poetry, and I don’t much like poetry, so I admit I skimmed through whole pages, but I came out with some questions.
It really intrigued me that someone would write such a novel, of men being lost out in the wilderness and what happens to them is rape, not mugging or robbing, or anything like that. I can’t help but wonder what was going through the author’s head.
I spoke to a friend of mine who told me that the author lived in a place where he was surrounded by wilderness and so always feared the wilderness, but I’ll be darned if it doesn’t seem really far-fetched. I mean, how many men go out in the wilderness and instead of just getting lost/dying/being robbed, are raped every year?
In some ways it struck me as sort of a Lord of the Rings, for adults - the descent into barbarism and madness but just for four people.
Anyway, I always get a different view of books when I come here, so any insight is wonderfully welcome. Thank you.
I don’t see it as being far-fetched. I don’t see why it is much more unlikely than a robbing would be. I do see that such a crime would be much less likely to be reported than a robbery, and a robbery would make a much more banal novel. I have not read it, but what you are describing sounds as if the plot describes a Jungian night journey.
One assumes you meant Lord of the Flies, otherwise that’s hilarious.
The point of the rape is that it’s something most men are actually afraid of, instead of being exciting or thrilling or anything else you can distance from yourself.
What I took away from it was that the city fellows had their illusions about themselves destroyed.
To borrow from Queen, they considered themselves “Princes of the Universe.” They had good jobs and comfortable incomes. They could afford some nice toys and to go on trips. A little bit of hunting, fishing, and camping even had them convinced they could conquer nature. Their attitude toward the hill people in the first part of the book is, at best, patronizing. Clearly, they believe themselves to be dealing with their inferiors.
Their experience on the river destroys all that. One of them is killed. One of them is raped. Those who survive are badly injured. All their toys are destroyed. They lie about everything that has happened to them and go scuttling home.
Louis was an interesting character to me. He seemed driven by an inner fear that, in the end, he wouldn’t be good enough. I always thought he put an arrow through one of the rapists mostly to prove to himself that he could do it.
Not surprising, since the author, James Dickey, was far better known as a poet than as a novelist when Deliverance was published.
Not really. Dickey grew up in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, and when he wasn’t in the military durring WW II and Korea, he was living in either Nashville, Houston, Atlanta, or Columbia, SC.
Thanks for the useful new jargon. I now have a way to describe Modoru Motoni’s Shiiku Gakari Rika besides “Lord of the Flies meets A Clockwork Orange, but for girls”.
Scumpup’s description really helps. To add, not only were the two remaining ones injured, but it was pretty heavily implied that the narrator, at least, as well as the victim of the rape, would never ever be the same people.
I guess I am going to watch the movie, though not soon (probably when I’ve fully absorbed the book.)
I think Lord of the Flies fits better with Freudian symbolism with the one with glasses representing the superego, the main protagonist being the ego and the leader of the pig stickers and the pig stickers representing the id. What happens there is more of a recognition of what lies within, but it doesn’t seem as transformative as a night journey would be.
I just don’t see it. In no world do I see a male-on-male rape as likely as a robbing…men can be savage, but I just see it as a much smaller percentage of people who decide to rape a total stranger that they meet out in the woods than just take all of his stuff and maybe humiliate the “city folk” a bit. However…
It seems to me that the two rapists had no intention of letting the city boys go. After raping them, they’d have certainly killed them.
Whether in the real world one would be likely to encounter such men is less important than the purpose they served in the story. The city boys, especially Louis (or is it Lewis?) considered themselves to be manly outdoorsmen. The narrator, IIRC, basically hero-worships Louis/Lewis.
They see themselves going on this grand adventure. They treat the hill folk like retarded servants. They see the river, like the rest of nature, as one more thing put here for them to enjoy.
Then, once they get “out there,” it all goes to smash. Nature isn’t just their playground. The river and the hill people, which are both essentially aspects of raw Nature in the book, brutalize and humiliate them. Their civilized airs and their money and their toys were for naught.
Big, bad Lewis backshoots a guy, then breaks his own leg and becomes a burden. Drew gets killed outright, though it is never clear whether by the river or by a bullet…doesn’t matter either way. Bobby, of course, gets sodomized. The narrator does find hidden reserves of will and strength he never new he had; but it’s ambiguous whether the man he kills was actually one of their assailants. Then they have to tell a fragile network of lies to escape the hill country law and flee back to suburbia.
The moral? I don’t know. Civilization makes us weak? Don’t fuck with Nature? Always tuck a tube of personal lubricant into your luggage?
Naw, you’re pretty much right in everything, Scumpup (except it is Lewis). It just seemed a really strong jump to me, to go to the rape.
The rape in the book is much more stark from what I’ve heard of the movie, too. There isn’t anything as spoof-able as the movie (I have seen a 100 spoofs of that scene) - it’s just simple, bare, naked, and ugly.
As strange as it may sound, I think you’re in for a treat when you see the movie. The sheer meanness and evil of the bad guys, combined with damn fine acting (the author plays the backwoods sheriff at the movie’s end, btw) by all the majors (Burt Reynolds’ finest performance, IMO), makes it a movie that impacts strongly and stays with you (especially on the big screen; movies like this can lose much of their impact on small televisions but less so with some of today’s large-screen TVs, which is what I would suggest you watch it on if possible).
Anyway, I read the book shortly after the movie came out and don’t remember much of it, but many scenes from the movie are still as vivid as when I first saw it. The rape scene is very well done: not too graphic but enough so that the meanness and revulsion and subjugation attendant to it are very clear. Those guys were just flat out mean sonsabitches.
(Btw, the rapist has had quite a successful career as a character actor, appearing in lots of movies and TV shows where no one knows who he is. He even has a website called squeallikeapig.com :D, but you might want to hold off looking at it until after you’ve seen the movie. Seeing him in a different context might take some of the edge off when you see the film.)
Well, since we’re talking about it, does anyone know the straight dope on this, from the IMDb Reynold bio?
I found a post on the IMDb forums that says Burt was prone to telling tall tales on talk shows, put this, apparently, was published in his autobiography:
I read the book exactly to “take some of the edge off” the film. I am a little creeped out by what I’ve heard of that scene, so I figured if I read the book and learned some of the background, it would help. And I think it will - I have the movie on my Netflix now.
I always hated this book because it seems to me to present a spoiled city kid’s view of the mountains and of mountaineers. (not surprising, since James Dickey was a spoiled city kid.) There’s a lot of bigotry in there, and it’s there because Dickey’s writing about people he doesn’t know or understand.
