The conflict between man and nature in Deliverance is key to the meaning of the work’s title. At the beginning of the novel, nature offers deliverance from the monotonous routines of daily life. By the novel’s end, the men must be delivered from nature, both in the form of the exterior world and of their own primitive instincts, unleashed as a result of their contact with the wilderness. This exploration of the relationship between humans and the forces of nature informs the descent-and-return structure of the novel, in which four “civilized” men descend into an elemental state in which survival is the only goal.

The friends initially view the weekend canoe trip as an enjoyable escape from the monotony of urban life. Nature is at this point something over which the men exercise imaginative control. This is evident as the four look at the map of the wilderness they will soon visit. The author uses personification when referring to the map and foreshadows the rebelliousness of nature when humans attempt to master it:

It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north (1).