"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

A meticulously researched reading of James Dickey’s To The White Sea, Casey Clabough’s article is an artful contribution to American Studies. In discussing the process of "merging" with the landscape, Clabough’s work tells a tale of assimilation that bears strong resemblance to frontier narratives while showing shades of diaspora literature, as well.

"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 [printable version]

Casey Clabough

Genius resides in instinct; goodness likewise. One acts perfectly only when one acts instinctively.

Freidrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe

If I were to tell you that the rise of any free bird/Is better/the larger the bird is,/And that I found myself one of these/Without surprise, you would understand/That this makes of air a thing that would be liberty/Enough for any world but this one,/And could see how I should have gone/Up and out of all/all of it...

James Dickey, "Eagles" in The Whole Motion

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman.

Robinson Jeffers, "Inscription for a Gravestone" in The Selected Poetry

<1> 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).

<2> Among the notes for his third novel, Dickey lists Muldrow's resources as "his cool," "his purpose: to get to...the sea 'with ice in it,'" "concealment," and "his ruthlessness." Following a discussion of Muldrow's background and its sources, I will be examining To the White Sea in terms of the qualities Dickey identifies. The first and last of Muldrow's assets, his "cool" and "ruthlessness" [2 ], are expressions Dickey uses in depicting Muldrow's conscienceless personality, and I will seek to illustrate how Muldrow's circumstances and Dickey's background materials mold the character into an unrepentant killer. Even so, despite Muldrow's pitiless love of bloodshed, he is a sympathetic character throughout much of the novel. This is due largely to his semantic appeal, which -- possessing an unusual combination of stunning poetic imagery and glib common sense -- seduces the reader into his world view. Whereas Dickey had strongly encouraged the reader's merging with Ed Gentry, Muldrow presents substantial problems, and the reader, as with the language of Joel and Alnilam, ultimately must decide whether to accept Muldrow's deadly impressions or write them off as dangerously delusional. Establishing the importance of Muldrow's discourse, I go on to demonstrate how it leads to his Umwelt, or self-world, which is based largely on a philosophy of latter-day Epicureanism. This is apparent both in his dialogue with the American monk and his obsessive cataloguing of equipment. Muldrow's interest in matter and space also intersects with his need to arrive at the "sea with ice in it," the spatial and material environment in which he feels most comfortable. Correspondingly, I reveal how his magnetic drive northward takes on the quality of migration as he begins associating himself with various animals through the practice of dreaming. Amid his identifications with creatures and the drive to go north, Muldrow develops and perfects his method of camouflage or "concealment," which feeds upon a dynamic of inhumanism that, in turn, makes his final transformation possible. Having waited throughout the novel, like the speaker in "Fog Envelops the Animals," to feel "Long-sought invisibility/Come forth from my solid body" (Dickey 1992, 80), he arrives at a cumulative juncture in space, time, and place where he presumes such a metamorphosis is possible.

<3> A scion of the frozen north and a product of the icy wastes, Muldrow is shaped -- both inside and out -- by the environment that surrounds him. At the beginning of the novel he explains that he grew up on the north side of "the Brooks Range, which is away from everything, facing away from the States..." (Dickey 1993, 10). Even at this early stage, before we know much about him, Muldrow stresses the lonely autonomy of the habitat that forged him. It exists not "away from" specific places and objects, but rather "away from everything," a condition that reflects back upon the place itself -- "the Brooks Range" -- and the person who inhabits it: Muldrow. Significantly, Muldrow identifies his home by a geographical feature, a range of mountains, instead of evoking a principality or his national allegiance. Although Alaska is part of the United States, Muldrow characterizes his section of the Brooks Range as "facing away from the States," symbolically turning its back upon and rejecting the country that claims dominion over it [3 ]. Muldrow conceives of himself and his home as looking outward, northward -- to an even colder and wilder environment -- as opposed to gazing inward, toward the culture and civilization of the United States.

<4> Dickey used Barry Lopez's book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), as a major background source for both portraying Muldrow's arctic landscape and establishing his connection with Eskimos [4 ]. Lopez attributes his book to "two moments," one of which takes place near Muldrow's Alaskan habitat, in "the western Brooks Range of Alaska" (xvii). He recalls watching with lonely fascination, as Muldrow does in his youth, the herds of caribou, the wolverine, the elusive fox, and various migratory birds -- all flourishing in a seemingly barren landscape, nearly devoid of people. Throughout Lopez's engaging book -- a fluid arrangement of history, science, and memoir -- the dynamics of desolation, beauty, alienation, and death constantly reappear, culminating in an act of homage. Asserting at the book's conclusion that "the landscape and the animals were like something found at the end of a dream" [5 ], Lopez faces northward and bows to the inscrutable Arctic -- a worshipful act that suggests Muldrow's repeated idealizations of his Alaskan environment.

<5> In addition to the rich frozen wildness of Lopez's book, Dickey employed Vardis Fisher's novels Mountain Man (1965) and Dark Bidwell (1931) as source texts for Muldrow's upbringing and personality [6 ]. Mountain Man takes place in the American West, north of the Oregon Trail, during the 1840s. The story follows Sam Minard, a scout and trapper, whose pregnant Crow wife is murdered by a band of renegade Crow. Vowing revenge, Minard declares war on the entire Crow nation and much of the novel is spent describing his battles with various Black Feet and Crow, to whom he becomes known simply as "The Terror." Minard's interest in woodcraft and fighting strategies (which he compares to the tactics of various wild animals), and his single-handed attack on an enemy nation are suggestive of Muldrow, although their characters and circumstances are otherwise quite different.

<6> More of Muldrow's character, especially his childhood development, is drawn from Dark Bidwell's Jed Bidwell, a boy raised in a rattler-infested Idaho gorge on the Snake River in the early 1900s. Fisher's summary of Jed's childhood development is notable for its remarkable similarity to Muldrow's:

Everything around him [Jed], for that matter, invited him to solitude or to reckless deeds. The great mountains, the untamed headstrong river, the wild animal life and the lonely blockade of winter months -- he felt the power of all these, and their ruthlessness, and their savage ways. He took the spirit of them into his soul. The people whom he met, besides his own kin, were coarse in speech and thought. Sly sheepherders became his tutor, feeding his hungry imagination, suggesting deeds that he had never done. The early events of his life, often the tasks which his father gave him to do, shaped his emotions into a pattern of pride and revenge.

And so he grew, schooled by savagery. Cruelty in his life was a meaningless word. Suffering and pain he was accustomed to from his first years. The agony of a tortured thing meant no more to him than the flow of the river or the cutting down of a tree; and he looked upon death as calmly as he looked upon life. (151-152)

Like Muldrow, Jed is shaped by the environment in which he is raised, taking its qualities into himself -- "into his soul." The morals of civilization mean nothing because they are such alien, nearly nonexistent, concepts; their only representatives are wandering sheepherders and occasional traveling settlers -- themselves not very civilized.

<7> In this vacuum of morality and collective human existence, Jed Bidwell gives himself over almost entirely to the qualities of the inhuman natural world [7 ]. The sheepherders who rarely visit, like Muldrow's Eskimo acquaintances, offer a weak sampling of human interaction but -- "coarse" and uneducated -- there is nothing overly civilized about them, and their existence too depends on nature and animals. Also significant in Jed's development is the importance of the father -- described by people who knew him as "a little bit out of his wits" (16) -- whose reasons for coming west "remained a dark riddle" (18), a play on his name, Dark Bidwell. Muldrow's father's basis for moving from Virginia to Alaska is equally ambiguous, even to his only son. Muldrow speculates:

He had his own reasons for being there, which he never did get around to telling me, or that I ever really understood. It may have been he got into some kind of trouble, back in Virginia or somewhere in the States, though I don't think it had anything to do with the law. But something had happened to him that made him want to be by himself, or maybe he was just that way all the time. Like I say, he never did give me the straight of it. (Dickey 1993, 19)

Echoing the eccentricity and possible madness of Jed's father, Muldrow says of his own, "The red wall was my father's only strangeness, though other people might have told you different" (Dickey 1993, 213). While other civilized humans regard Jed's and Muldrow's fathers as peculiar or perhaps even mad, the sons -- raised without the benefit of any substantial comparative references -- accept their sires' behaviors as customary, allowing them to shape their own.

<8> It is Jed Bidwell's father who, for practical reasons -- the protection of crops and livestock -- encourages Jed to kill woodchucks and wipe out the snake population on their property. Yet the result of this responsibility is a nurtured love of killing in Jed -- a desire to outwit and destroy the entire species of whatever animal happens to threaten him. In order to eradicate them, Jed, like Muldrow, dedicates untold hours to the study of creatures -- following them, watching them, and imitating them. He shares with Muldrow the obsessive poetic love of an animal's appearance and manner. Having built a snake pit, into which he casts dozens of captive rattlesnakes, Jed sits "on the stone wall, staring with pride into his venomous den. His breath would come slow and deep, and his eyes would darken, as he sensed fully their tamelessness and their power. He loved their jungle ferocity, and the lidless cunning hatred of their eyes" (177). Identifying himself with the powerful aspects of nature and its predatory creatures, Jed, like Muldrow, develops a strong inhuman and immoral personality from which he draws his opinions on existence: "'Some things is good,' Jed declared, 'and some things is bad. The bad things should ought-a-be killed. Human or beast, it's all the same to me'" (210).

<9> A dominant byproduct of Jed's and Muldrow's upbringings is their predatory inhuman ruthlessness, which resembles the indifferent environments that produced them. Possessing an animalistic poetic sensibility, Muldrow conceives of the Alaskan landscape as Robinson Jeffers portrays the coastal hills at Sovranes Creek: "This is the noblest thing I have ever seen./No imaginable/Human presence here could do anything/But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion" (358). Because Muldrow is so irrevocably alienated from human society, some readers have labeled him the victim of a de-evolution [8 ]. Yet, it is Muldrow's very Götterdämmerung, his downfall from the communal order of societal norms and mores, which enables him to survive as long as he does. Mindful of this dynamic, Dickey constructs a provocative scenario in which a human being's subsistence hinges on the strength and effectiveness of his apparent inhumanity.

<10> According to Dickey, Muldrow's lack of a conscience [9 ] is based on Xenophon's Anabasis [10 ], the ancient historical account of 10,000 Greek soldiers who fight their way home 1,500 miles through rugged terrain and numerous barbarian hordes. Like Muldrow, the Hellenes find themselves far behind enemy lines in an alien culture. After several Greeks are beheaded -- like the downed airman in Dickey's novel -- while negotiating a truce, the survivors vow to use any means necessary that they might glimpse the Hellespont again. Like Muldrow, who also wishes to reach a specific geographic destination, the Greeks repeatedly commit what most twenty-first century readers would consider atrocities or war crimes. Throughout the campaign they liberally kidnap young boys and women of all ages from various villages to keep with them as unwilling sexual companions and hostages. More suggestive of To the White Sea, in one incident, after repulsing a contingent of Persians, the Hellenes resolve to maim and behead the bodies of the fallen in an effort to discourage the enemy's morale. This episode calls to mind both the firebombing of Tokyo, which is partly an "anti-morale" raid, and Muldrow's decapitation of the old woman. Although Muldrow clearly is amused by his handiwork, his action, like that of the Greeks, accomplishes the practical military objective of spreading fear and confusion in the enemy's homeland. Furthermore, Xenophon -- the advisor of the Hellenes and narrator of the account -- never hesitates to make human sacrifices of prisoners when consulting the gods on matters of military strategy. Like Muldrow's path, the swath cut by the Greeks is littered with enemy corpses [11 ].

<11> Dickey also claimed that Muldrow's conscienceless demeanor was drawn in part from the personality of Ted Bundy, the famous serial killer. Like Muldrow, Bundy enjoyed manipulating his appearance for the purpose of luring his victims to him. Using crutches or placing an arm in a sling, he often asked attractive female undergraduates to help him carry books to his Volkswagen Bug, at which point he would force them into the vehicle and spirit them away to a secluded place where, having eliminated the possibility of detection, he could rape and kill them at his leisure. However, although Bundy was an ingenious predator who displayed little guilt and, like Muldrow, killed women, his similarities with Dickey's protagonist end there. With his good looks, magnetic charisma, and keen intellect, Bundy resembled Joel Cahill more than Muldrow. Whereas Bundy relied on conventions of humanity -- qualities like physical attractiveness and civic virtue -- as props for his premeditated crimes, Muldrow imagines his actions in natural terms, shunning society-based deceptions for the lethal instinctive cunning of rapacious beasts [12 ].

<12> Coinciding with Muldrow's developmental background and "ruthless" personality are the linguistic explanations he gives for his actions. Dickey maintained, "The hardest part of writing To the White Sea was to establish a tone or voice for Muldrow which would be convincing and yet distinctive to him. He's practically illiterate, but he has a highly developed personal mystique, which he states as a matter of course as though anybody would understand it. Actually, nobody but he understands it" (Kirschten 68). Dickey strengthens the appeal of Muldrow's unique discourse early in the novel by setting it in relief against less attractive language [13 ]. In the book's first few pages, Muldrow's discriminating commentary appears reasonable versus the hyperbolic Krieglust of the Colonel's fire-bombing speech: "'Fire....We're going to put it in his eyes and up his asshole, in his wife's twat, and in his baby's diaper'" (Dickey 1993, 1). As in Alnilam, military language functions as an unflattering alternative discourse to that of the protagonist. Exact, concise, and ordered, military speaking contrasts with the illiterate but frequently penetrating musings of characters like Frank Cahill and Hannah Pelham -- who often speak in what Dickey labeled "country surrealism" [14 ]. Muldrow falls into this category as well, although his discourses on dream and nature also possess the poetic lyricism of Joel and the Alnilam language, ringing with the same groping attempt to articulate sublime aspects of existence.

<13> Beyond his negative use of military semantics, Dickey further attracts the reader to Muldrow's language by contrasting it with that of Arlen and the "Florida boy," the green airmen who approach him in the barracks. The larger of the two, Arlen, comes across as an insecure bully, flaunting his juvenile snake tatoo and badgering Muldrow with idle threats. In the face of Arlen's aggressive language ("I could bust his back with one chop" [Dickey 1993, 6]), Muldrow appears patient and forgiving, returning the money he wins from Arlen in their pinch-grip competition. He is equally tolerant of the Florida boy, who reveals his naivete and fear of combat in the numerous questions he asks, which threaten to annoy both Muldrow and the reader. In his interaction with the young airmen, Muldrow's language seems neither boastful, like Arlen's, nor unsure, like the Floridian's. Against the inadequacies of the inexperienced fliers, Dickey portrays him as a patient and mature soldier who happens to excel at his job.

<14> Muldrow continues to attract our understanding along dialogic lines once his plane is shot down, justifying his violent actions through repeated references to the emasculating and "decapitation-happy" Japanese, who have pledged to maim and execute any American airman found in Japan. Having stressed this dynamic to the reader, Dickey uses two events in order to finally undermine Muldrow's credibility: his seemingly gratuitous decapitation of the old woman and his confessed responsibility for the pre-war death of the "Kansas girl." After inviting the reader's allegiance through the first half of the book, Muldrow performs alienating acts -- both apparently committed on nothing more than a whim. To the White Sea, like Deliverance, is a first-person narrative; however, in the later novel Dickey upsets the reader's relationship with his narrator in order to make her/him examine more fully both the nature of Muldrow and the reader's reading practices. Dickey plays with the idea of reader/text merging by forcing the reader either to condemn Muldrow on the basis of his actions or accept him, subordinating his destructive deeds to the aesthetic value of his philosophical vision. Through Muldrow, Dickey flirts with an aspect of the eternal debate involving art and morality: should, for example, a brilliant work of art be celebrated for its raw aesthetic genius or condemned for its unconscionable ethics if written by or about a serial killer, racist, sexist, or someone equally "immoral"? Faced with such a dilemma, the reader must determine whether to reject Muldrow and the novel on ethical grounds or to defer his indiscriminate killing in favor of his compelling artistic imagination.

<15> Through Muldrow's poetic sensibility, rendered in sparse, penetrating language, the reader is made privy to the world he sees around him: his Umwelt [15 ]. Muldrow's interpretive outlook is essentially epicurean in that its foundation rests on material objects and the space in which they exist [16 ]. Dickey accentuates this philosophy during Muldrow's conversation with the American ascetic. As Ernest Suarez rightly deduces, "Dickey uses the scene in that Muldrow encounters the American monk to distinguish between Muldrow's naturalistic impulses and the monk's Zen Buddhism" (Suarez 1994, 9). Beneath Muldrow's "naturalistic" drive -- his attempt to take on attributes that will enable him to survive in Japan -- rests his epicurean sensibility, which is apparent in his emphasis on the use and function of physical matter. After he kills the Japanese swordsman, Muldrow remarks, "You're a good one....You sure are. I can use you" (Dickey 1993, 175), and indeed he does utilize him materially, splintering his forearm and gathering the boney needles for the purpose of sewing his arctic outfit.

<16> Drawing on his epicurean world view, Muldrow discounts the American monk's philosophy because it rationalizes things into abstractions for which he has no use or interest. After the ascetic's psychological interpretation of dreams and temporality, Muldrow thinks, "I had never heard any kind of talk like this, and I tried to head it off. Not that it bothered me, but I couldn't find any way to connect with it, or get interested in it" (Dickey 1993, 195). The monastery's rock garden functions as the epitome of such abstract uselessness, symbolizing the monks' fabricated relationship with nature. As an artificial human construction of the natural world, the rock garden is, to Muldrow, as worthless as it is uninteresting. Whereas the monks repeatedly order nature into a time-honored, formulaic arrangement, Muldrow wishes to know and assume the identity of the natural world as it truly is. While Zen practitioners flirt with the void for the purpose of enlightenment (kensho or satori, the apprehension of the authentic self), Muldrow appreciates the importance of nothingness in relationships between natural manifestations [17 ]. When, for example, he muses upon the shared qualities of clouds and icebergs, he concludes, "There was no reason for them to be like they were, and have the shapes that they did, except that that was the way they happened to be, for nothing" (Dickey 1993, 18). For Muldrow, nothingness is an integral part of understanding the natural world rather than an abstract tool in the quest for an essence of the inner self.

<17> Further, Muldrow's contempt for the monk's impractical acquired knowledge, as opposed to his own experience -- based, epicurean understanding, is substantiated later when he thinks back on their conversation:

I thought of something I should have said to him when he was coming at me with all that religious stuff he had learned how to say. This would have been good, I thought: when he said something like, God is everywhere there is, God is in the snow, I should have come back at him and said, No, the snow is in the snow. That would have settled his hash, and it made me feel better when I realized I could have said it. (Dickey 1993, 217)

Elsewhere, Dickey himself has endorsed Muldrow's non-religious material-based mentality, asserting, "The human being does not address or learn how to live with, to love and to use, by getting away from the immediate reality of the things of this world but by diving into them" (Dickey, "Foreword" x). Muldrow's allusion to snow and Dickey's emphasis on exploring "the immediate reality of things" also suggests Hegel's characterization of nature as frozen and non-spiritual:

In Nature,...in theological language, we have the Divine Idea momentarily excluded from the Divine Love: everywhere it shows anticipations and vestiges of intelligence, but in a frozen, petrified form, in which God may be said to be dead. Nature, in short, is the raw material of self-conscious Spirit, and being raw, it is, in its immediate form, the exact antithesis of anything spiritual. (Findlay 272-273)

Recognizing snow for what it is -- a minuscule manifestation of raw nature -- Muldrow resists the monk's spiritual imposition of a divine entity upon it. For Muldrow, Dickey, and Hegel, spirituality is something humans bring to and imprint upon nature. Thus, Muldrow cannot help but abjure spiritual claims to universal enlightenment. As Richard Jefferies -- one of Dickey's favorite writers -- maintains, "By no course of reasoning, however tortuous, can nature and the universe be fitted to the mind. Nor can the mind be fitted to the cosmos" (Jefferies 49). When Muldrow compares icebergs and clouds he is glad that they are the way they are "for nothing"; abstractions only threaten to misdirect him from the natural essence he seeks to know and become [18 ].

<18> Dickey used Peter Matthiessen's collection of journals, Nine-Headed Dragon River (1986), for background on Zazen, monastic practices, and the Japanese landscape [19 ]. Matthiessen's diaries constitute an introduction to Zazen from an American's perspective and Dickey likely drew on the "I" of Matthiessen's writings as a model for the American monk in To the White Sea [20 ]. The Zazen aim -- "a silent training directed toward unification of body, mind, and spirit with the universal consciousness sometimes referred to as Oneness, Zen Mind, Buddha-nature" (Matthiessen 14) -- superficially appears to suggest the embodiment of what Muldrow ultimately attempts to achieve. Yet, his goal is to assume the being of a physical place rather than bond with a transcendent spirit -- a significant distinction. Furthermore, the monastery Muldrow visits strongly resembles Matthiessen's description of Kennin-ji, a traditional Rinzai training center with several stone gardens, where "seven days a week, as in the old days, thirty-one monks arise at 4:00 A.M. for zazen....In the afternoon the monks perform their monastery duties, followed by zazen until near midnight" (172). The nocturnal ascetics Muldrow encounters wandering in the fog appear to be functioning on a similar ritualistic schedule. In addition to Kennin-ji, Dickey drew on Mathiessen's discussions of Zen time for the American monk's conversation with Muldrow. Matthiessen's citation of Dogen Zenji, a thirteenth-century Soto master, in regard to "Being-Time" -- the understanding that different beings and states exhibit varying interpretations of temporality -- suggests the ascetic's discourse on dream time and real time. Finally, Matthiessen's book makes references to Hokkaido and the native inhabitants he calls "the remnant aborigines, or 'Hairy Ainu,' tall, blue-eyed, bearded hunter-gatherers, at one time considered a relict population of the early Cro-Magnon" (236). The tribe to which Muldrow refers as "the little bearded people, the bear people," (Dickey 1993, 261) are probably based on the Ainu, although he makes no mention of their blue eyes or the fact that they are taller than the average Japanese.

<19> Beyond the sequence involving the American monk, Muldrow's Epicureanism is present in his compulsive itemizing of equipment, which takes place at frequent intervals in the book. To be sure, equipment is critical in the Arctic, where a person cannot survive outside for long without the necessary tools (and the skill to use them) to provide mobility, food, and warmth. However, Muldrow's fondness for his equipment, which Dickey claimed he took from George Orwell [21 ], goes beyond the simple idea of material preparation. In his notes, Dickey contends that Muldrow's things have a "talismatic quality" [22 ], exemplified by their associations with aspects of nature. For example, in addition to appreciating his knife's flexibility, Muldrow is interested in the way it captures and reflects light. He is fascinated by the manner in which it can manipulate light; in addition to having the pliable capacity to curve around a bone when plunged into someone, the blade can also "bend" light, giving Muldrow a certain control of and use for nature's illuminating element. Angling his knife toward a candle inside a Japanese home, he "catches" the flame on the blade and explains with satisfaction, "That was my mark" (Dickey 1993, 82).

<20> In addition to his fondness for objects like the knife and compass -- which gives him pleasure through its adherence to the northern magnetic pull -- Muldrow enjoys appropriating physical aspects of the challenging opponents he conquers. Hoping to gain some of the power of his most worthy adversaries, he takes some physical part of them as a way of internalizing their essence. In addition to the aforementioned bone splinters of the skilled Japanese swordsman, Muldrow uses the skins of the goats that gore him with their horns. He is ecstatic when the bear women present him with a shirt and pair of pants made from the hides: "These were the hides I had skinned off the goats in the woods, and I can tell you I was plenty grateful, because I wanted to have that kind of vitality and fire pass into me. I had already eaten a lot of the goats, and now to wear them, too, would be luck beyond the best of luck" (Dickey 1993, 251). Dickey's interest in the talismatic effect of Muldrow's possessions is underscored by the fact that he read William Humphrey's The Spawning Run (1970) [23 ] in the hopes of finding a way to exhibit the "fishing mystique" in Muldrow [24 ]. Humphrey's first-person narrator goes into great detail in cataloguing his gear and fishing techniques as if the gear itself is essential in understanding the fish. Similarly, based on his background, Muldrow believes that the proper comprehension and mastery of an adversary or environment is partly contingent on having the appropriate implements.

<21> In addition to its focus on gear, Humphrey's The Spawning Run is a literal and symbolic meditation on instinctual homecoming, in terms of both salmon and humans, and just as salmon return, through very formidable obstacles, to mate and die in their native streams, so Muldrow works his way north to the environment of his youth -- the native habitat in which a defining transformation awaits him. Muldrow struggles to articulate the underpinnings of his migration, confessing "North was north, and it would stay that way. And there was the pull of something else to go with it: that other thing that was not called north but was at the same place, the thing nobody could say" (Dickey 1993, 39). Scientifically, Muldrow's journey north is the embodiment of what biologist Hermann Schöne calls "goal orientation," a term which "includes all orientation behaviors that lead the animal to a previously determined place, near or far away. To reach distant or hidden goals an animal must employ orientation mechanisms whose spatial references are not directly associated with the goal" (Schöne 14). In Muldrow's case the unrelated mechanisms are those necessary in negotiating the diverse environments through which he passes during his trek toward the "goal environment" [25 ]. Although Muldrow cannot express goal orientation as the "something else" he feels tugging at him, he recognizes aspects of it in various things. At the end of the decapitation scene with the old woman, Dickey wanted to emphasize Muldrow's "definite reluctance to leave the water-wheel: the connection of the wheel and the water, the never-ending quality of it, touches something in him; some primitive thing" [26 ]. Although Muldrow cannot fully grasp it, the wheel's motion of eternal return suggests his own migration, which is also a return to his beginnings, through the cycle of elements, and constituting -- in its relation to the point of origin and return -- the circle of life.

<22> Muldrow's migratory impulse, his goal orientation, is also animalistic in its absorption of different creatures' characteristics for the purpose of increasing its effectiveness [27 ]. This is something with which Dickey had experimented in his poetry. In his introduction to The Achievement of James Dickey (1968), an early collection of Dickey's poems, Laurence Lieberman makes the observation:

In the earlier poems, Dickey supposed he could give up his human self to the animal realm. The human/animal encounter in the last poem of the series, 'Encounter in the Cage Country,' has become a medium through which his human limitations can be transcended, but in going beyond his human condition, he no longer transforms into a new, wholly other being; instead, he intensifies and deepens the human self by adding animal powers to it. (Lieberman 21)

In addition to its similarities with some of Dickey's poetry, Muldrow's belief that animal traits are bound to his own human existence is a powerful Eskimo conviction. In Arctic Dreams, Lopez relates that Eskimos "have difficulty imagining themselves entirely removed from the world of animals. For many of them, to make this separation is analogous to cutting oneself off from light or water" (180). Drawing on Eskimo culture and his own poetic method, Dickey adds a compelling animalistic dimension to Muldrow's directional odyssey.

<23> The main avenue by which Muldrow identifies with animals and their characteristics is dreaming. In his dream visions Muldrow exhibits a "totemic" relationship with creatures, in which the dream beast he imagines bestows its powers upon him [28 ]. As Suarez holds, Muldrow's transformations are not abstract or philosophical: "instead each moment represents a transcendental attempt to attain skills that will enhance his power within the natural world" (Suarez 1994, 7). The alien systems through which Muldrow passes and the lack of animals he encounters on Honshu are responsible for the vivid immediacy of his dreams: "There was something about Japan that bothered me, now more than before. In all these woods, among the trees, under them, in them, and over them, there were not many birds, and I hadn't seen any animals at all. The ones in my head got stronger, though; stronger because of the absence of the others. Luck or not, I couldn't tell you" (Dickey 1993, 125). Muldrow's dream creatures are, in fact, fortunate for him since they strengthen his animalistic sensibility, unconsciously contributing in his practical need to survive.

<24> Although Muldrow's dreams generally benefit him, they occasionally threaten to cloud his conscious perception of reality, resulting in dangerous situations. At one point he boasts, "I can hear as well as anything on two feet, and most of them on four. I can listen with any animal" (Dickey 1993, 115). However, Muldrow is both envious and embarrassed when he realizes the senescent swordsman can hear better -- as well as move more quickly -- than he. Indeed, his underestimation of the elderly man's auditory ability and darting swordsmanship nearly costs him his life. Muldrow's miscalculation with the swordsman makes the reader dubious when he later maintains, "I could outthink any animal or bird that lived in the cold, by thinking more like he did than he could do. All I had to do was get there" (Dickey 1993, 214). Becoming overly enamored of his Umwelt, Muldrow occasionally allows his dreams to become seductive abstract panaceas instead of life-enhancing catalysts. While plummeting to earth earlier in the novel, Muldrow becomes lost in the dream-like sensation of bodily flight and comes to believe, like Joel Cahill, "that a man ought to be able to fly without an airplane" (Dickey 1993, 26). However, almost simultaneously he realizes, "But that was dangerous: I could have held on to the notion too long" (Dickey 1993, 26) and returns to his epicurean mind-set in time to activate his chute.

<25> While Muldrow's dream visions have an element of danger, more often than not they are beneficial to and symbolic of his practical challenges. For example, the recurring image of deer heads, introduced at the conclusion of the train ride (Dickey 1993, 145), which Muldrow calls "Deer Herd for Infinity" [29 ], suggests his northward journey. Just as the entire herd gazes into eternity, so Muldrow concentrates all his energy and focus in one direction, toward a goal that is singular yet vague. The arrangement of Muldrow's unconscious world is suggestive of Paul Valéry's comments on the practicality of dreams:

Man is the separate animal, the curious living creature that is opposed to all others and rises above all others by his...dreams! -- by the intensity, succession, and diversity of his dreams! -- by their extraordinary effects, which may sometimes even modify his nature, and not his nature only, but that surrounding nature which he tirelessly endeavors to subjugate to his dreams. (Valéry 29)

In addition to applying the positive elements of his dreams to his practical actions, allowing them to shape him in the process, Muldrow permits his reveries to define and shape the environment around him. As a result, the landscape Muldrow perceives, filtered through his dreams and his Umwelt, is drastically different from that which is visible to most humans. Shaped by him and reflected through him, the land is something he ultimately wishes to be the same as himself -- a place in which he might hide to the extent that he becomes the place.

<26> In a letter to his editor, Mark Jaffe, Dickey summarized his novel [30 ]:

Drawing at least partly on his upbringing in northern Alaska, on the Arctic Circle side of the Brooks range, he [Muldrow] has an instinctive knowledge and mastery of camouflage, the use of color to make himself either invisible or the next thing to it. The sections of the novel are divided into episodes dealing with the color spectrum, beginning with red -- the fire-bombing raid on Tokyo -- and ending in white, as Muldrow reaches the northern tip of Hokkaido and sees the icebergs in the water, fulfilling what he has told someone in the first section of the novel: 'For me, the ocean is not the ocean unless it's got ice in it.' (Bruccoli and Baughman 454)

Dickey's comments on camouflage and "the color spectrum" reveal both Muldrow's interpretation of landscape and the text's underlying symbolic structure. At one point Dickey had even thought to entitle different sections of the book using the names of various colors, and early manuscripts demonstrate this practice. The black section of the novel, which also includes red, pertains to the burning and smoking descriptions of Tokyo. These colors then give way to orange as Muldrow leaves the city and dawn breaks on the Japanese countryside. Next, yellow, the balance of the roads and the countryside as he journeys north, becomes the dominant color, reflected further in the yellow glimmer of light on the knife blade. Dickey asserted that brown "centers around a grove or forest of trees, with pine needles on the ground. Everything brown" [31 ]. This section, in which Muldrow colors his hand the same color as the landscape, overlaps with blue -- the sequence at the lake where he rests and begins to "conceive of Japan as his domain" [32 ].

<27> The symbolic sequence of colors concludes with white which, drawing on his upbringing, Muldrow feels is the best color for camouflage. He says of his youth in Alaska: "I got to know what lived up there in the snow, and how they lived. Some of the animals, and birds, live by being able to hide, and the others live by being able to find 'em. But being hard to see, to make out, is part of it on both sides" (Dickey 1993, 16). Although Muldrow likens himself to both predator and prey, he has a special affinity for aggressive animals like the wolverine and hawk. Describing one of his poems, "Fog Envelopes the Animals," Dickey recounts the joy invisibility brings to the predator:

'Fog Envelops the Animals' is about hunting. In the poem, fog rolls up and envelops the protagonist....He feels himself become invisible. We all want to be invisible, at least part of the time, but most especially the hunter does....In this case, the hunter being exactly the same color as the fog, has total concealment. As long as he can see enough to shoot, but the animals can't see him, he's in heaven. (Dickey, Self-Interviews 111)

Muldrow exhibits a similar feeling in his preferred method of killing, which brings his oblivious antagonist directly to him. Capitalizing on the blindness of the swordsman, Muldrow explains, "I led him with sound, he came in, he came onto my knife. I held it for him, just so" (Dickey 1993, 175). In the snow-covered expanse of an arctic environment Muldrow feels that his invisibility and camouflage come closest to reaching their potentials; in perfect harmony with his surroundings he revels in silence, whiteness, and hunting.

<28> Although Muldrow often speaks of camouflage in mystical, inhuman expressions, his merging also operates in terms of other human beings. During the chaos of the firebombing raid on Tokyo he endeavors to blend in with the panic-stricken Japanese masses: "Through the blasts of smoke I got into the crowd, making the turn to be in their direction and slowing down to their pace, which was a kind of fast shuffle" (Dickey 1993, 44). Seeking to lose himself in the moving multitudes, he discards his efficient running for the herd-like shuffle of the terrified crowd. Using his mind instead of his legs, Muldrow later assumes the mental perspective of a Japanese soldier who is trying to kill him, anticipating his opponent's course of action. After having used his predatory cunning to dispatch two other servicemen, Muldrow pauses: "I changed my mind around and thought with him" (Dickey 1993, 202). Like Ed Gentry's mental identification with Stovall's perspective in Deliverance, Muldrow thinks with his antagonist in order to survive -- merging with the other for the purpose of its annihilation [33 ].

<29> In addition to Ed's and Muldrow's shared method of mind-merging, both are also significantly transformed by their immediate surroundings. Just as Ed is shaped by the river, becoming fluid and shifty in relation to his circumstances, Muldrow is influenced mentally by the camouflage he takes on from his various environments. Rubbing soot into his face during the bombing of Tokyo, he feels a change taking place: "As the color of my face disappeared and went to another color, there was something inside me that changed, too. It moved, and then sat still. In my mind there was a shape I couldn't exactly make out, but it seemed to be in a crouch, pulled up into itself and ready, and that was the feeling I got from the soot, the stronger the more I put on" (Dickey 1993, 47). Putting on a physical aspect of his immediate environment triggers a response from deep inside Muldrow's consciousness. In addition to its general suggestion of his predatory nature, "the shape" inside him is strongly suggestive of what Eskimos call the angakoq, a being of immense power and ardor, whom Lopez characterizes as "an intermediary of darkness" (217) [34 ]. The angakoq possesses the gift of qaumaneq:

The inexplicable searchlight that enables him to see in the dark, literally and metaphorically. He reaches for the throat of darkness; that is the primitive, as primitive as an explosion of blood. Out hunting, in the welter of gore, of impetuous shooting, that heady mixture of joy and violence, sometimes it is possible for an outsider to feel the edge of the primitive. Unbridled, it is frightening. It also defeats starvation. And in its enthusiasm for the concrete events of life, it can defeat what weighs against the heart and soul. (217-218)

In the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, Muldrow summons the angakoq which banishes his trepidation and accentuates his predatory confidence as he crouches in the shadows of burning buildings, waiting for the right victim. Further suggestive of the angakoq's presence, although Muldrow's black face makes him resemble the soot-smeared Japanese civilians, he identifies -- not with them -- but something, not someone, less distinct: "I was not like them, I say again; like something else" (Dickey 1993, 47).

<30> Muldrow's successful use of camouflage in and around Tokyo helps him to arrive at his conscious strategy for reaching Hokkaido. After fleeing from some civilian men and hiding behind a wall, he thinks of the lynx and muses at great length on the prospect of surviving through his utilization of color:

You need the color of the place you're in. Even in the big rush of good feeling, when the colors came over me and I felt like I could be any of them, any time of the day or night: when I felt like I could lie down in green or yellow, in purple or red, in the moonlight or the sunrise, and I could stay until I got ready to get up and go on, and nobody would know, or fall out of any of them, like a hawk: fall on somebody's back, or right into his face like a blaze of light flashing through him, or doing anything I wanted, I knew that it was only part of the truth, only part of the truth that would be, from here on. There would be lots of colors between me here and the snow fields there, between me and the ocean and the bergs, and there was not any way I could take advantage of everything between the place I was now -- this wall -- and where I was trying to get to. But there would be long stretches -- there were bound to be long stretches -- where the color was more or less the same, and if that was true, I could find some way to tap in on it, take advantage of it, make it work for me. If there were colors in Japan, if there were colors in the world, I could go with them, be what they were. I could, damn it: I sure could. When I came on a long stretch of color -- stayed in it for a day, maybe -- I would try to make the best way to do it for the next day. (Dickey 1993, 72-73)

Having already instinctually exercised his gift for concealment, Muldrow rationalizes it as a long-term practice of survival -- a progressive method that can both deliver him to Hokkaido and bring him closer to the transformation he seeks.

<31> As a result of Muldrow's oblique statements and allusions, his specific understanding of camouflage -- and what it leads to -- remains partially buried. As in the concept of the ghost in the machine in Alnilam, in which Joel has ostensibly come out on the other side of the machinery he idealizes, Muldrow's philosophy of camouflage takes him to the other side of visibility, and he even evokes a ghost when speaking about it:

To be invisible and still know what was going on, that was something. I wondered what it would be like to be a ghost. When I started thinking about camouflage, like I say, I knew what I wanted to do -- no, what I had to do. It was going to be the way....There ought to be places between me and the mountains and the snow fields where I could more or less pick the colors, and take them on, at least in some way. If I took my time -- and I had plenty of it -- I should be able to fit the color of some of my situations -- hillsides, fields, woods -- and tune to them by color. Maybe this wouldn't always work, and maybe I wouldn't always be able to do it, but I planned to try. It was worth it, worth a lot. It might be worth everything. (Dickey 1993, 101)

Muldrow's assertions that he "has" to practice concealment and that it "might be worth everything" point to the defining metamorphosis toward which he is gravitating. Like the migratory impulse of the salmon, Muldrow's drive becomes something he lacks the power to alter: an unavoidable destiny he does not and cannot resist.

<32> Like Joel Cahill's arrival on the other side of the machine, Muldrow's transition puts him beyond human existence and more fully into the place that surrounds him. Dickey explains:

Muldrow wants to achieve the perfect camouflage. He believes that the perfect camouflage will enable him to cease to exist and merge with the landscape. The only thing that will give him away is his eyes. When he closes them, he thinks he can become the place. He is covered with his own blood and swan feathers when he goes out into the snow and attempts to become a landscape of snow and cold and desolation, an environment that he's always loved so much. Perhaps he's killed. It may be that death itself is the perfect camouflage. I'll leave that for the reader. (Suarez 1996, 130)

Although the speeding bullets complicate the exact nature of Muldrow's ultimate fate, he fully believes that his shift into a place has the power to save him, transferring his essence to a non-human area of existence:

From watching the animals and birds up on the muskeg, on the tundra, and on the Brooks, I've always believed that if camouflage is good enough, if it is right exactly, the bird or the animal will not just be invisible, it won't be there. When the rattlesnake did something so that my eyes -- which can see what the others can't -- couldn't pick it up, I knew I was right. My hand on the bare place on the slope, there in Japan, was like that. Like that or just about, it was almost somewhere else, or just not. (Dickey 1993, 112)

At the conclusion of the novel, when Muldrow feels a bullet pass through him without touching him, we are either witness to the surreal impressions of a dying man or the moment of metamorphosis in which he sheds his humanity and assumes the identity of his surroundings -- literally becoming "somewhere else" or "just not" [35 ].

<33> Muldrow's final transformation, whether into death or a place, also rescues him from the barren solipsism of his human existence. No longer constituting a destructive and alienated self, Muldrow becomes part of the "all" that constitutes a natural environment. Such a shift suggests David Abram's use of Edmund Husserl's defense of phenomenology against the accusation of solipsism: "The field of appearances, while still a thoroughly subjective realm, was now seen to be inhabited by multiple subjectivities; the phenomenal field was no longer the isolate haunt of a solitary ego, but a collective landscape, constituted by other experiencing subjects as well as by oneself" (Abram ix). Constituting a connective part of a collective place, Muldrow rejoices at being "everywhere in it" (TS, 275). Furthermore, Abram maintains that the premise of his philosophical and ecological book, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), asserts that "we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human" (37), and Muldrow appears to establish the ultimate "contact," to the point that his human form no longer exists.

<34> Although Muldrow's final transformation marks the literal death of his human existence, there are hints of his departure from the human world throughout the novel. While riding on the train and imagining various animals, he recounts, "The chute had saved my life, but this was better -- better, believe me, there are better things than life" (Dickey 1993, 144). Meditating upon the qualities of inhuman creatures, Muldrow belittles the importance of his own mortal existence, for, in becoming an inhuman place, he feels that he will have achieved a higher level of being. As Sartre says, "Let no one reproach us with capriciously creating a being of this kind; when by a further movement of thought the being and absolute absence of this totality are hypostasized as transcendence beyond the world, it takes on the name of God" (Sartre 171-172). Having moved "beyond" the human world and into the planet's very essence, Muldrow becomes part of the inhuman order of things, which many people identify as God. And losing his human life along the way is a small price since "One who lives the life of the universe cannot be much concerned for his own" (Santayana 56).

<35> In addition to dream animals, the most powerful expressions of Muldrow's inhumanism are linked to manifestations of ice. At one point Dickey had even thought to use an epigraph concerning icebergs from Arctic Dreams: "I looked up at the icebergs. They so embodied the land. Austere. Implacable. Harsh but not antagonistic. Creatures of pale light" (224-225); like the icebergs, Muldrow wishes to "embody the land" and his cold, inhuman harshness is part of what makes that possible. Although he is responsible for many deaths, Muldrow does not kill in inimical rage, but rather revels in his own existence -- solitary and white, he, too, is a creature of pale light. Muldrow's inhumanism is also captured in another manifestation of ice. While paddling from Honshu to Hokkaido, he remembers witnessing the pure blue heart of a calving glacier:

I had seen it, and would see it again, the real pure thing, the pure color. Believe me when I tell you that when the glacier calves off there is something that you don't get with every day....Well, where I was heading I couldn't get enough of remembering it, the pure blue: the pure more-than-blue...It was the most intense, and the most pure, it was -- well, you could say -- secret, the best of it, the heart of ice, the heart you never had any idea was there, and when you saw it, knew had to be there. (Dickey 1993, 231-232)

In Arctic Dreams, Lopez speaks of a Lakota woman, Elaine Jahner, who holds that the religion of hunting peoples relies on the idea that "a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape...occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different" (245). In the icebergs and the blue heart of the glacier, Muldrow glimpses cold inhuman embodiments of the natural world that promise another reality. His identification with them simultaneously reminds him of something in himself and increases his desire to become part of their natural essence.

<36> After leaving the bearded bear people, Muldrow exclaims, "I felt young, young and on top of the whole situation, to go on up north, to go into it" (Dickey 1993, 157), and the final step of his inhuman evolution centers around his connection with the old hermit's great birds. More than his imaginary dream creatures, the flying predators demonstrate the bestial abilities and visionary perception he wishes to attain: "I began to transfer my feelings -- or soul, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it -- to them, because they did more than any other creatures for the wish I had that was most like me: not only the need to attack but to fall on something from above" (Dickey 1993, 265). However, more than their diving attacks, Muldrow admires their vision, which fascinates him because it is superior to that of any human. He reflects, "The hawk's view, which was beyond any man's. It was being able to see what you don't. It was being able to see into the snowbank, into the stone. To see beyond what any human, any man who has ever been born, could see. Like I tell you, out of the snowdrift, into the snowdrift, into the stone" (Dickey 1993, 271). Nietzsche conceives of the average human as being "deeply immersed in illusion and dream images; their eyes glance only over the surface of things and see 'forms'; their sensation nowhere leads to truth, but contents itself with receiving stimuli and, as it were, with playing a game of touch on the back of things" (Nietzsche 1967, 175). Muldrow admires the hawks because they see beyond surfaces and into the hearts of things. Possessing an inhuman visionary power, the birds apprehend the essence in all things; something Muldrow achieves only rarely, as when he glimpses the heart of the calving glacier.

<37> Having arrived at the inhuman sensibility necessary for his transformation, Muldrow waits for the appropriate time: "All the time I'd been in Japan, all the time I'd been living, this seemed to be the truth of the thing: you can get to the perfect blend if you know exactly how to do it, and if the time is right" (Dickey 1993, 272). Reaching at the northern tip of Hokkaido and developing his understanding of the birds, he has nothing left to accomplish as a human being. In a letter to Richard Roth [36 ], Dickey explained that in the film version he envisioned Muldrow disappearing amid a heavy gust of snow while the Japanese posse fires at him (Bruccoli and Baughman 509). Like the speaker in "Fog Envelopes the Animals," Muldrow feels that "Soundlessly whiteness is eating/My visible self alive./I shall enter this world like the dead,/Floating through tree trunks on currents/And streams of untouchable pureness" (Dickey 1992, 80). Although he may literally be killed by the bullets, Muldrow agrees with Lucretius that, "The minds of living things and the light fabric of their spirits are neither birthless nor deathless" (Lucretius 108). Dead or transformed, he feels himself flowing out of his human existence and into the grand being of another. Whether or not the metamorphosis actually takes place, Muldrow's Umwelt can only believe that it has; in his dream of reality it is real enough.

Notes

[1] Series 2.3, box 91k, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[2] Ibid., 12. [^]

[3] Muldrow's apathy for his country is further demonstrated by his lack of patriotism and respect for the military, both stemming from his staunch, almost radical, individuality. At one point he explains, "I had a way of doing things that was about half the Air Force's and half mine" (Dickey 1993, 20). [^]

[4] Series 2.3, box 91k, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[5] Ibid., 371. [^]

[6] Series 2.3, box 91k, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[7] Jed's and Muldrow's upbringings also mirror that of Joe Makatozi in Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed (1986), a popular novel that anticipates To the White Sea in a number of important respects. Taking place during the 1980s Cold War, the story follows Major Joe Makatozi, an American Sioux Indian, who is captured when his experimental aircraft goes down over Siberia. Escaping from prison, he resolves to follow the path of his ancestors and cross the Bering Strait, thousands of miles to the Northwest. Like Muldrow and Jed Bidwell, Makatozi's isolated wilderness upbringing has prepared him for such an undertaking. L'Amour recounts, "He had never lived on a reservation. His one white grandparent had left considerable property to the Makatozi family in the Snake River country of Idaho, most of it high country in the mountains, a land of rushing rivers, of small meadows and forest. Most of the land lay far from any highway, completely cut off in winter, isolated even in summer" (Louis L'Amour, Last of the Breed [1986] 12). In order to make it to Alaska, Makatozi resolves that he, like Muldrow, "must cultivate the art of invisibility" (145). However, along the way, he becomes less interested in escape as he moves progressively closer to the ways of his ancestors: "All this -- the forest, the wilderness -- it is my home. With each day I find myself regressing....I am supposed to be escaping, and to win my own battle, I must escape. Nevertheless, in many ways I'd rather stay here" (208). While Makatozi does not share Muldrow's poetic sensibility or love of killing, he exhibits a similar knack for woodcraft and survivalism during his icy northward journey. Although Dickey never cited Last of the Breed as a source or even admitted reading it, its strong similarities to his book are difficult to ignore. [^]

[8] For condemnations of Muldrow's inhuman survivalism see Sandra B. Durham, "A Felt Absence: The Female in To the White Sea," James Dickey Newsletter 13/2 (Spring 1997): 2-7; Collie Owens, "Quest for the Savage Self: The Unrepressed Man in James Dickey's To the White Sea," James Dickey Newsletter 11.2 (Spring 1995): 16-24; and Richard Wiley, "The Fittest Survive, But Fit for What?" Los Angeles Times, 19 Sept. 1993, Book Review 2+. [^]

[9] For readings that argue the novel's violently nihilistic content overpowers its fine poetic form see Joyce Pair, "'The Peace of the Pure Predator': Dickey's Energized Man in To the White Sea," James Dickey Newsletter 10.2 (Spring 1994): 15-27; Richard Martin, "Yankee on the Edge," Review of To the White Sea, Far Eastern Economic Review (28 April 1994): 41; Leon Rooke, "Sergeant Muldrow finds Transcendence," New York Times Book Review (19 Sept. 1993): 14; and Gail Caldwell, "Shooting the Moon," Review of To the White Sea, The Boston Globe, 29 August 1993, B12+. [^]

[10] Series 2.3, box 91k, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. Xenophon, Xenophon's Anabasis: The March Up Country, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: New American Library, 1970). [^]

[11] Readings that consider the novel's socio-political and cultural implications against Muldrow's conscienceless demeanor include Nelson Hathcock, "No Further Claim to Innocence: James Dickey's Revision of the American War Story," Texas Review 17/3-4 (Fall/Winter 1996/1997): 26-42; Ernest Suarez, "James Dickey's Literary Reputation: Romanticism and Hedonism in To the White Sea and Deliverance," The South Carolina Review 26/2 (Spring 1994): 141-153; and Douglas Keesey, "James Dickey's To the White Sea: A Critical Controversy," James Dickey Newsletter 10/1 (Fall 1993): 2-16. [^]

[12] For a depiction of Ted Bundy's personality see Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me (New York: Norton, 1980). [^]

[13] For examinations of the book that consider the reader's (in)ability to identify with Muldrow's dialogue see Ronald Curran, Review of To the White Sea, World Literature Today 68/4 (Autumn 1994): 809-810; and John Melmoth, "A Man in the Wilderness," Times Literary Supplement (11 Feb. 1994): 21. [^]

[14] In his notes for the part of the book he called the "Blue section," Dickey wrote, "Make some of his talk and diction sound something like that of Huckleberry Finn." Series 2.3, box 91k, 18, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. Dickey's determination to infuse Muldrow's language with Huck's rough combination of natural innocence and penetrating realism further underscores his attempt to make Muldrow engage our sympathies. [^]

[15] For readings that praise Muldrow's and/or Dickey's poetic rendering of nature and primitive savagery see Lawrence Lieberman, "Warrior, Visionary, Natural Philosopher: James Dickey's To the White Sea," The Southern Review 33/1 (Winter 1997): 164-180; George Searles, Review of To the White Sea, America 172/14 (22 April 1995): 261; Steve Brzezinski, Review of To the White Sea, The Antioch Review 52/3 (Spring 1994): 358; Bill Hunt, "Homeward Bound," Alaska 60/1 (1994): 75-76; Gary Kerley, "Living, Survival are Epic Poetry in 'Sea'," Review of To the White Sea, Atlanta Constitution, 26 Sept. 1993, N8+; Greg Johnson, "A Walk on the Dark Side," Review of To the White Sea, Chicago Tribune, 19 Sept. 1993, 14.5; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "From Man to Beast of Prey," Review of To the White Sea, New York Times, 13 Sept. 1993, C17; and Review of To the White Sea, Publishers Weekly, 240/25 (21 June 1993): 82. [^]

[16] Muldrow's brand of Epicureanism also resembles Edmund Husserl's original idea of Phenomenology: an apprehension of things themselves -- the "touched" dimension of experience. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Carnes (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). [^]

[17] Ironically, for all his vaporous preaching about the void and self-dissipation, the American monk goes out of his way to alert the Japanese military to Muldrow's presence, confirming that his interests are very much of this world. [^]

[18] Another example of Muldrow's distaste for abstraction is his refusal to name the hermit's giant predatory birds. For him, what they are and what they do is all that matters: "There was another side to them, another dimension, you might say. I never put names to them. Names are chickenshit; they didn't need any names" (TS, 265). At one point in the composition process Dickey was determined that Muldrow too should remain nameless. His editor, Mark Jaffe, talked him out of it. [^]

[19] Series 2.3, box 91k, 16, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[20] Matthiessen's description of a Canadian monk at one of the Japanese monasteries also suggests the American ascetic and his behavior: "The Canadian monk who showed us about seemed at once eager and ill at ease, as if voices from home in this far place might dispel the effect he had come so far to find" (Matthiessen 225). [^]

[21] Series 2.3, box 91k, 2, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[22] Ibid., 15. [^]

[23] William Humphrey, The Spawning Run (New York: Knopf, 1970). [^]

[24] Series 2.3, box 91k, 23, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[25] For readings that interpret Muldrow's journey as a mythical quest or ritualistic exercise see Lawrence Broer, "Fire and Ice in Dickey's To the White Sea," Texas Review 17/3-4 (Fall/Winter 1996/1997): 1-25; Joyce Pair, "Postmodernism and To the White Sea," James Dickey Newsletter 12/2 (Spring 1996): 19-23; and Marion Hodge, "'All that Religious Stuff He had Learned How to Say': Camouflage, Ritual, and Writing in To the White Sea," James Dickey Newsletter 11/1 (Fall 1994): 12-19. [^]

[26] Series 2.3, box 91k, 22, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[27] For examinations of Muldrow's practice of identifying with animals see Ronald Baughman, "James Dickey's Evolving Self and the Void," James Dickey Newsletter 17/2 (2001): 8-13; and Steven G. Kellman, "Sergeant Muldrow's Bird's-Eye View," Texas Review 17/3-4 (Fall/Winter 1996/1997): 43-49. [^]

[28] See Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality, and Ecocriticism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000): 132. [^]

[29] Dickey notes that Muldrow's vision is a description of a painting of the same name by Billy Dunlap. Series 2.3, box 91k, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. Dunlap also made Dickey's life mask in the early 1970s. [^]

[30] The letter is dated 19 September 1988. [^]

[31] Series 2.3, box 91k, 21, Special Collections Department, Woodruff Library, Emory University. [^]

[32] Ibid. [^]

[33] Unlike Ed, however, Muldrow uses merging in order to get into the problem-solving area of his own mind: "Driving along on the dregs of my gas, I tried my best to get back into my feelings and thoughts on the log train, where everything seemed so easy. Then, I could project forward and back, and get involved in the landscape of my own head" (Dickey 1993, 217). With landscape as a metaphor for the mental topography of others and himself, Muldrow believes he can get to the essential being of his own thoughts and others', just as he becomes the embodiment of his physical surroundings. [^]

[34] Strengthening To the White Sea's connection to Eskimo myth, Muldrow's buddy, Tornarssuk, takes his name from a supernatural being in Eskimo legend who bestows power upon those he deems worthy. In most stories Tôrnârssuk serves as an attendant helper, much like an assisting Greek god, to a mortal. Although Muldrow's friend does not appear to possess any divine powers, he is present when Muldrow witnesses the sublime heart of the calving glacier. In Eskimo myth Tôrnârssuk often is associated with Kokogiaq, a great multi-legged bear. [^]

[35] Although Dickey never wrote the screenplay for To the White Sea, he often recorded ideas for it. At the conclusion of the film, he wanted to portray Muldrow's would-be killers as not knowing "where he is. They don't know what's happened. What has happened is that he's a place. One of the posse picks up Muldrow's red knife out of the snow and looks at it uncomprehendingly, and then they go on walking around, as the camera pulls back, and that's the end" (Suarez 1996, 131). [^]

[36] The letter is dated 23 July 1996. [^]

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