To the White Sea by James Dickey

First published: 1993

Type of plot: War

Time of work: 1945

Locale: Japan

Principal Characters:

• Sergeant Muldrow, an American tail gunner on a B-29 in the Pacific, whose unit is sent to bomb Japan in the latter days of World War II
• The American monk, a member of a Zen monastery in Northern Japan
• The falconer, an old hermit living in a shack on the island of Hokkaido

The Novel

To the White Sea recounts the journey of Sergeant Muldrow from Tokyo to the northern island of Hokkaido. Muldrow bails out of his plane, an American B-29 bomber, when it is shot down on a raid over Tokyo. He is the crew’s only survivor.

Muldrow’s journey begins in a sewer, where he hides while awaiting the next day’s bombing raid by the Americans. Amid the panic and chaos it causes, he joins the crowds streaming through the burning city, shoots a man for his clothing, stabs a woman who recognizes that he is foreign, and stabs another man for his shoes. Safely out of the city, he heads north, sleeping along the road, hiding in fields, his only weapon a small bread knife, carefully honed and polished. One night, outside a house where a small family is at dinner, he lets the candlelight glint off the knife blade, then moves on, thrilled that he has left his mark.

Along the way, he feels as though he enters the tree, the stone, the lake. Wrapping himself in animal hides gives him the power of that animal. In his element, in control of his fate, he has seldom been happier, eating the raw flesh of a swan, using its feathers for a mattress, and preying on humans. He stabs an old man for his winter clothing. Near an airfield, Muldrow sees Japanese soldiers decapitate a captured American prisoner. The scene lowers even further his respect for enemy life. Shortly after, he stabs a woman and puts her severed head in a waterwheel bucket. This grisly episode is followed by a touching encounter with two small children. Patiently, he makes a string design for them, then sends them safely back to their house.

Hiding on a logging train heading north, he feels a spiritual oneness with the wind, snow, and clouds. He spends several days by a secluded waterfall, resting and fishing. Resuming his trek north, he slips into the house of an old samurai soldier and a woman. The two men fight, sword to knife. He kills the man, then the woman. Calmly shattering the man’s arm, he makes a needle of the splintered bone and stitches together a garment for his northern journey. Encountering an American monk in a field, Muldrow accepts his offer of food and shelter at the Zen monastery nearby. In the night, however, Japanese soldiers take him prisoner, beating him with their rifle butts. In transit to their base, he kills the four guards and speeds north in the military truck. Finally reaching a fishing village opposite Hokkaido island, he steals a boat and paddles to the island. Ashore, he comes upon a herd of large goats attacking a native hunter, whom he rescues. Gored in the leg by one of the goats, he is taken to a village and cared for by the grateful natives. During the weeks of his recovery, he learns that they are chiefly bear hunters, and their cruel taunting and shooting of captured bears appall him. As he leaves the village for the wilderness, he stabs the native guarding a bear cub and frees the creature.

Several days later, he comes upon a shack of an old falconer. Fascinated by the giant hawks the old man has trained to hunt, Muldrow decides to stay. As he learns to hunt with the birds, he feels his soul transferring to them. They possess what he has been seeking all along: the power of flight. His journey has brought him to spiritual fulfillment. On the day he discovers the old falconer has died, the shack is surrounded by Japanese soldiers. He feels ready for the final stage of his journey, spiritual transformation. Covering himself with swan feathers, his own blood, and the blood of the old man, he steps in front of the soldiers. As they riddle him with bullets, his spirit takes flight, and he is transformed into a fiery wall, then into the wind, snow, cold. Now, he is everywhere.

The Characters

The world of the novel is the mind of Muldrow, so the importance of any character is determined by his or her relation to Muldrow’s journey and thoughts. Each is used to define Muldrow’s character. A newcomer to his flight crew, for example, prompts Muldrow to explain the need for careful preparation. Readers see how skilled he is in survival techniques, how methodical and focused he is. The encounter with the old samurai warrior reveals Muldrow’s superior instincts and skill with a knife. The native hunters in Hokkaido demonstrate the universality of human depravity, especially in their treatment of animals. Each character reveals something important about Muldrow.

Muldrow was reared in Alaska and as a child was taught by his father to hunt and shoot a gun; his favorite survival tools are a knife and a piece of flint for making fire. He has the instincts and skills of a ruthless, methodical killer who feels spiritually akin not only to the lynx, wolverine, and fisher marten but also to trees, rocks, wind, and clouds. His journey through Japan is more than a flight to safety; it is a spiritual quest for fulfillment. The farther north he goes, the closer he comes to his physical death and spiritual birth, or transformation. The mystical experiences he encounters in his journey sometimes appear to be the hallucinations of a madman, but the final portrait is that of a loner who has escaped not only Japan but also human existence, merging with the forces of nature.

The American monk epitomizes the kind of human Muldrow despises and, presumably, flees. Muldrow dismisses the monk and his treachery with the thought, “He had to be like he was—for the rest of his life, too, and that was bad enough.” The monk’s is an understated presence in the novel but forceful nevertheless. He says that he came to Japan to lose himself, meaning the materialist that America had made of him. Readers come to realize, however, that the man has indeed lost himself, for in betraying Muldrow, he has betrayed the principles of truth and humanity. Ironically, he lauds the benefits of meditation and a life that contemplates the spirit in the stone. The life of meditation offers a purity of mind and spirit, but his own life has become corrupted by self-interest. His palaver about the spiritual life throws into relief the depth and intensity of Muldrow’s.

The old falconer is a hunter who lives alone in the Japanese wilderness. Despite his inability to communicate with Muldrow in words, he teaches Muldrow how to hunt with the hawks and shows that Muldrow does not completely withdraw from all human contact.

Critical Context

Although Dickey’s reputation as a poet overshadows his novelistic achievements, he enjoyed considerable popular success as a novelist with the publication of his first novel Deliverance (1970), in which wilderness survival and deliverance from modern conditions are major themes. In his poetry and his fiction alike, Dickey is concerned with humankind’s relation to the natural environment. The way Muldrow speaks of the spirit of trees, rocks, and other natural objects reflects Dickey’s belief that a common spirit informs all things and that one is, like Muldrow, enriched and empowered by becoming one with these natural objects. Muldrow wears the skins of animals not only for warmth but also for the almost magical power he derives from them. Smearing himself with the old falconer’s blood has ritualistic overtones and suggests that Muldrow gains power from it as well as from the swan feathers.

The novel also explores ways of fusing the inner and outer states of consciousness. Although outer events are usually clearly distinct from Muldrow’s thoughts and emotions, he often tries to bring the reader into his perceptions, as when he speaks of the sunlight in the lake, the blueness of the iceberg, and the nature of cold. In the end, the fusion of inner and outer states is complete, at least in Muldrow’s experience.

The novel reflects Dickey’s belief that civilization undercuts skills necessary to survive extreme situations. Muldrow is an ideal portrait of man’s return to nature. He is the quintessential survivor, relying on primitive instincts and skills to survive. The role of violence in that survival is a major part of the novel and has attracted negative critical attention. Dickey himself may have encouraged this unfavorable reaction by referring to Muldrow as a sociopath. Pathological tendencies may be detected in Muldrow’s graphic descriptions of his killings, in the way he mutilates some victims, and in his pleasure in the way his knife sinks into his victims. Even his final transformation, though it suggests spiritual triumph, comes amid much blood and physical mutilation. By ending with an emphatic image of man escaping the physical world through fire into pure air and spirit, Dickey seems to be saying that only violence can wrest the spirit from a world gone mad.

Bibliography

Baughman, Ronald. Understanding James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Chapter 1 offers a useful overview of Dickey’s poetry and prose, including subjects, themes, and techniques. The chapters are brief, and the discussions are accessible to the general reader.

Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. James Dickey. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A chapter on Dickey’s prose sheds light on To the White Sea, discussing such subjects as primitivism, the hunter and the hunted, and others.

Kirschten, Robert, ed. “Struggling for Wings”: The Art of James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Published just after Dickey’s death, this book collects reviews, interviews, and essays that cover the whole of Dickey’s work, including Deliverance and To the White Sea.

Lieberman, Laurence. “Warrior, Visionary, Natural Philosopher: James Dickey’s To the White Sea.” The Southern Review 33 (Winter, 1997): 164-180. Traces connections between To the White Sea and Dickey’s poetry, showing how the novel represents a fictional expression of Dickey’s themes.

Suarez, Ernest. James Dickey and the Politics of Canon: Assessing the Savage Ideal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. What Suarez says of the savage ideal in Dickey’s second novel, Alnilam (1987), illuminates this theme in To the White Sea. Suarez’s substantial bibliography includes titles of works on poetry and fiction in general that are relevant to Dickey’s work.