Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In a final sortie the day before the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in the last months of World War II, Muldrow (his first name is purposefully never given), an American tail gunner, parachutes from his burning B-29 into the city. Protected at first by the smoke-blackened anarchy on the ground, he journeys north, away from the chaos and ruin of Tokyo, instinctively drawn toward Japan's sparsely-populated northern island of Hokkaido, a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure his survival. With little more than a knife and a small map of Japan he makes his way across enemy terrain, alert to both danger and opportunity. Yet with every step his journey progressively transforms into the flight of an inhuman beast -- hunting and hunted in a violent philosophical game of survival. Haunting images of his dark, lonely Alaskan youth consume his imagination as he stalks through a conscienceless world where every passing moment of his violent odyssey brings him closer to a strange and harrowing epiphany. Despite its Japanese milieu and singular narrator/protagonist Muldrow, James Dickey's final novel, To the White Sea (1993) has close symbolic and thematic associations with each of his first two fictional works. As in Deliverance (1970), water -- in this case, the ocean -- constitutes an identifying imaginative trope. In fact, Dickey originally called the book Thalatta, a variation of a Greek word meaning "sea" [1]. The novel's conceptual similarities to his earlier Alnilam (1987) are equally notable. At its conclusion, Muldrow's essence, like Joel Cahill's ghost, constitutes "a voice in the wind" (Dickey 1993, 274) and, analogous to the idea of Alnilam at the end of Crux: The Letters of James Dickey (1999), Muldrow feels himself changing form and moving with the air. However, although over the course of the book Muldrow journeys across and through the elements of earth, air, water, and fire, his general sensibility remains acutely earth-based. A child of the frozen arctic wastes, Muldrow thinks of the cold of high-altitude aircraft as "the wrong cold": "The cold of high air is not real, it's not honest. Cold should be connected to the ground, even if it's at the top of a mountain" (Dickey 1993, 20). Muldrow's strong association with the landscape, his use of and extended meditations on camouflage, make To the White Sea Dickey's apotheosis for the tactical practice of merging. Whereas the amalgamating actions of Ed Gentry and Joel Cahill are only symbolically apparent in his first two novels, Dickey directly explores Muldrow's poetic and literal desire "to blend in the place you're in, but with a mind to do something" (Dickey 1993, 273).
Repository Citation
Clabough, Casey. ""To Blend in the Place You're in, But with a Mind to Do Something": the Practice of Merging in James Dickey's To the White Sea." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–25. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss3/11