Word: medlock
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James Dickey wrote his book from the viewpoint of Ed Gentry, a middleaged commercial artist cognizant of his own limitations, living a comfortable life in suburbia with a wife and some but occasionally moved to greater passion than the bounds of his society normally permit His friend Lewis Medlock, is a wealthy landlord (by inheritance and physical-conditioning freak who compensates for the colorlessness of his contemporary existence by making frequent sojourns into nature. Gentry sometimes accompanies him. And the plot of Deliverance centers on one such trip...
With two other friends--Drew Ballinger, a bottling company president who represents everything good about suburban life (a moral and compassionate individualism), and Bobby Trippe, a salesman, who does just about the opposite--Medlock and Gentry take on their state's largest, toughest river in canoes. The Cahulawassee is about to be dammed up, made into Lake Cabula for the economic sake of marinas and retirement homes. Medlock wants to move as one with this unbridled piece of nature before its force is shattered...
GENTRY PARTICIPATES ENTHUSTASTICALLY, but fears Medlock's animal instincts: Lewis likes situations which demand primal confrontations between man and nature and man and his fellow, which pose mere survival as the only goal, and demand the urgent extension of all human powers save moral sense. And as murder adds to murder and natural injuries multiply, as Bobby is buggered and Drew drowned. Ed's fears are justified...
...brute level which he hasn't dared in his work and home. The image of the river, we are told, becomes a core to his actual rootlessness, and is echoed in new collages which Ed attempts at his office and a new acceptance of his family. Even Medlock, never before so close to death, becomes something better than he was --"a human being." Betting on his own morality seems to have drawn the spirit out of him and made it more compassionate...
...canoe trip, naturally, turns into a disaster. Medlock's dream of being tested for survival becomes a nightmare of trial by terrors that Dickey finds in the wilderness and within himself. During the run down the river, all four men nearly drown in the rapids. Lewis Medlock breaks a leg in a spill from a canoe. The mutual-fund salesman is raped in an act of sodomy by two mountain people who beset the city slickers. Gentry tumbles from a cliff with the body of a mountain man whom he shot with a bow and arrow while defending himself...