The
Civil War is entering its last, grisly year. Inman,
a veteran of the
Petersburg
and
Fredericksburg
campaigns, recovering from his wounds in a
Confederate hospital, decides he has had
enough of the pointless slaughter and walks
out, heading across the Blue Ridge Mountains
of
North Carolina
toward
Cold
Mountain
, where he hopes to reclaim his spiritual
homeland and
Ada
, the woman he loves. It is to be an
unforgettable odyssey through the
soon-to-be-defeated South, with Inman pursued
by relentless Home Guard troops whose task it
is to hunt out deserters. Interwoven
with Inman's heart-stopping adventures is the
story of
Ada
's own internal journey. As
Ada
and Inman's lives, long-separated, begin
finally to converge, they discover
unsuspected truths about themselves and each
other, and about the new world that is being
born from the ruins of the old.
Discussion
Questions
- Think
about the style, or the voice, in which
Charles Frazier tells his story. Do you
find it realistic or stylized? What does
it add to the overall effect of the
story?
- Charles
Frazier implies there was no moral onus
attached to the act of desertion because
of the moral barrenness of the Civil War
and the crimes committed on the
battlefield in the name of honor. What
do you think?
- Why
has Frazier chosen to portray the
deserters as good, and the Home Guard as
evil?
Do you agree with him?
- How
do Inman's views on secession, slavery,
and war change by the time he finds
himself in the military hospital?
- What
point does
Cold
Mountain
make about the nature and limitations of
human knowledge?
- What
do you conclude Frazier's ideas about God
to be, and how do they differ from
conventional Christianity?
- How
does Frazier portray the natural world:
as benign, treacherous, cruel, or
indifferent? Do
you see influences of Darwin, Wordsworth,
and Emerson in Inman’s, Ruby’s or
Ada
’s thinking?
- Throughout
Cold
Mountain
, the author works with the idea of the
search for the soul. Inman,
Ada
, Ruby, Stobrod, Veasey, and the
slaveholder's runaway son Odell are all
in some way engaged upon this search.
Which of them is, in the end, successful,
and why?
- Both
Ada
and Inman reflect, at different times,
that they are living in a "new
world" [p. 33]. What changes is
nineteenth-century
America
undergoing, and how do
Ada
and Inman's experiences, and the people
they meet, reflect those changes?
- How,
and why, is the ideal of womanhood
changing?
- Both
Ada
and Ruby were motherless children from
the time they were born. How has that
state affected their characters, formed
their ideas, and defined their
relationships?
- Several
of the novel’s characters meet their
death during the course of the novel. How
do their deaths reflect, or redeem, their
lives?
- What
mythical or animistic images does the
book offer, and what is their purpose?
How does Frazier view, and treat, the
supernatural?
- Charles
Frazier has based his novel loosely on
Homer's Odyssey. Which incidents
from The Odyssey do you find
reproduced in
Cold
Mountain
, and how has Frazier reimagined them?