Come Back to the Raft Ag´in, Ed Gentry, by Betina Entzminger

In his essay, â€Å"Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Ed Gentry,† Betina Entzminger argues that at the heart of James Dickey’s Deliverance lies the search for a lost masculinity in today’s world, told through the lens of the protagonist’s canoe trip. He asserts that Ed understands the societal pressures upon each gender, forces that compel us towards the stereotypes that pervade our culture. Further, Entzminger believes, â€Å"Despite the fact that Ed sees these constructions as constructions, he is unable to rise above them† (Entzminger). Ultimately, Entzminger posits, â€Å"Ed dutifully destroys that which challenges his own and his community’s conceptions of gender and sexuality, and he finds comfort in his return to his community at the novel’s close†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦show more content†¦More probable, Dickey meant to impose Ed’s need for masculinity within his own life, his appreciation of a man whom you could, â€Å"eve n see the veins in his gut† (Dickey 103), is simply Ed’s internal longing for manhood rather than a repressed homoerotic fantasy. Ed’s appreciation of Lewis’ toned physique represents to him what has been lost, an inner purity that he hoped to find on the canoe trip. Another major display of a shift in gender roles is the infamous anal rape scene. Ed and Bobby, who is the most effeminate of the group, are taken captive by two (likely) inbred woodland men. These men, pariahs to society, become embodiments of the defilement of nature experienced earlier in the novel, the trash in the river and the poultry processing plant. To Dickey, Man’s encroachment upon nature has not only led to the industrialization that plows fields and fells forests, or littered the wild with our excess and excrement, it has made humanity unable to reunite itself with nature. Once man has defiled a region with our technology and our influence, we may never go back â€Å"Dicke ys novel suggests that there is no free territory†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Entzminger). These mountain men have ostracized themselves from society, searching for a way to shake off the shackles of cultural expectation. However, in their attempt to become one with nature they have simply perverted it. The mountain men rape Bobby while Ed sits, idly waiting for his turn. Entzminger posits that the mountain men,