Deliverance

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1970

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3 Summary: “September 15th”

Ed goes into the forest before the others are awake. He sees a deer and fires two of his four arrows, but he is mentally unprepared to kill and misses. Ed tries to fire another shot, but the deer is gone. When Ed returns to the campsite, the men load their gear into the canoes. Ed takes Bobby as his canoe partner because he can see that Bobby is upset about his decision to come on the trip, and Ed fears Lewis will not put up with Bobby’s complaining. Ed discovers that Bobby is not a skillful paddler and worries their canoe, which is weighted down with gear, may overturn if they hit difficult rapids.

Ed signals Lewis and Drew to pull their canoe over to the bank. He asks Lewis to take some of the gear and supplies that he and Bobby have been carrying in their canoe. After a swim to cool off, the four men resume their journey. Ed and Bobby take the lead in their canoe, which now carries a much lighter load. Eventually, Bobby and Ed are about half a mile ahead of Lewis and Drew, and both men are exhausted from paddling in the heat of the afternoon.

Ed and Bobby stop on the riverbank to rest, and two men with a shotgun come out of the woods. They ask Bobby and Ed what they are doing there; Bobby purposefully insults them by implying they don’t know the river, and Ed inadvertently insults them even more by implying that they may be making whiskey. The men march Bobby and Ed back into the woods at gunpoint. They tie Ed to a tree, and the older man rapes Bobby. Just as Ed is about to be assaulted by the younger man, Lewis arrives and shoots the old man with an arrow. The younger man runs off into the woods.

The men debate what to do with the dead man’s corpse. Lewis observes that confessing to the death would lead to a trial and that the jurors in this part of the state would look at the four men as “furriners,” or outsiders. Drew supports taking the body to the next town and reporting the death to local authorities because concealing the body could bring about a “murder charge.” Ed is uncertain what to do, and Bobby responds by wordlessly kicking the dead man’s body repeatedly and then walking away.

Lewis argues for disposing of the body, arguing that this would as good as erase the crime. Although Drew continues to disagree, pointing out that someone might be hiding in the woods and watching them, Bobby finally speaks up to agree with Lewis. In the meantime, Ed realizes that Lewis is right and reasons with himself that if he is caught helping to hide the body, “it could be made to seem a matter of necessity, of simply being outvoted” (119).

The men take the body up a stream that branches off the river. Lewis adds that the area will soon be flooded and that there is little chance the state will hold up the dam project “just to look for some hillbilly” (117). Drew still disagrees with the plan and tries to convince Ed that he should also go against it, but Ed ignores Drew. Lewis disappears for a few minutes before returning from the woods; he then leads the men to a muddy spot. There, the three men bury the corpse and leave as quickly as they can.

After traveling on calm waters for an hour, the men hit rapids. As Drew and Ed navigate the churning waves, something happens to Drew that causes him to drop his paddle. Reaching after it, he falls into the water, turning the boat over. Drew and Ed tumble into the river. After struggling to survive in the tumultuous white water, Ed surfaces downstream where the river is calmer. He finds Bobby and Lewis in the water. Lewis has a broken leg, and Drew is nowhere to be found.

Lewis insists that Drew was shot. The three men realize that the partner of the man they killed may be on a hill above the river waiting to shoot them. Ed decides to climb up the cliff and kill the shooter with a knife or an arrow. He starts his climb, feeling for handholds. Just when he thinks he will fall because there is nothing to hold onto, he finds a small crack in the rock and pushes himself up into an open crevice.

Part 3 Analysis

The campsite represents the last real moments of peace in the narrative before the first major inciting incident: the physical assault on Ed and Bobby. The death ultimately speeds the group along their descent of the river, which the men tumble down chaotically, leading to Lewis’s injury and questions about the cause of Drew’s death.

The pivotal and brutal assault scene emphasizes both Conflicting Ideals of Masculinity and The Conflict Between Humanity and Nature. The two men, one old and one young, emerge from the woods as if they were part of nature. The ensuing sexual assault calls social constructs of masculinity into question by placing the middle-class men in a conventionally feminine role in relationship to their male assailants, whom Ed describes as rural and poor. The scene embodies the power struggle between regional and class-based concepts of male power, with the rural men commenting on the physiques of Ed and Bobby in ways that objectify and dehumanize them—a reversal of Ed’s similarly dehumanizing characterization of the rural people’s physicality in Part 2.

The killing of the older backwoodsman is the second inciting incident in the narrative because it moves the characters toward the next phase of action. Drew, who represents the values of law and justice, is the most vocally resistant to hiding the body. In arguing that the group should alert the authorities and explain what happened, he reflexively expresses a code based on societal values, but the novel suggests that those values cannot survive in the wilderness, where they are a hindrance to survival. Lewis’s instinct to survive rather than uphold abstract social ideals of justice wins over the rest of the men. The aftermath of the burial seems to affirm the men’s decision. Ed observes that the body disappears “into the general sloppiness of the woods” (124), and Lewis likewise acknowledges the power of nature when he observes, “Ferns’ll be growing here in a few days” (125). The image of nature reclaiming the body suggests that the friends are obeying the dictates of the environment in which they find themselves. Ed does momentarily regret hiding the body, experiencing a “tremendous driving moment of wanting to dig him up again, of siding with Drew” (124). However, this contrasts with his overall instinct toward self-preservation, which he elsewhere suggests would even have led him to turn on his friends if they were caught.

The hiding of the body is another crucial turning point in the novel because it physically and mentally exhausts the men just before they navigate the terrible rapids. It is at this point that the extent of Lewis’s hubris in bringing the men on the trip becomes fully clear. As they depart from the area where they have hidden the body, Lewis admits that “from what little” he knows, the men “haven’t hit the rough part of this river yet” (126). Lewis clearly knows less about the river than he suggested at the outset of the trip, and what he doesn’t know proves disastrous, underscoring both The Effects of Hubris and the conflict between humans and nature. The men’s struggle to discern whether it was the rapids or a bullet that knocked Drew from the canoe merely underscores the backwoodsmen’s function as an extension of nature itself.

The conflict between humanity and nature continues as Ed decides to scale the cliff to track and kill the man they believe killed Drew. In a scene that parallels the trajectory of the trip as a whole, Ed at first feels capable of scaling the rockface but eventually becomes so exhausted he begins to think of himself as an animal; he perceives his foot in search of a foothold as burrowing, foreshadowing his animalistic hunt for the man he will shoot in the next section. The motif of sexuality is also evident in the cliff-climbing scene, as Ed joins in a union with the rock as a symbol of nature—a feeling he characterizes as “intimacy.”