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Cold Mountain | Introduction

When Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain was published in 1997, it gained immediate critical and popular success, lasting sixty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and gaining the National Book Award along with other accolades that year. Readers responded to the stirring tale of a Confederate soldier named Inman, his long journey home from the horrors of the Civil War, and his bittersweet reunion with the woman who waited for him. The novel cuts back and forth between Inman’s difficult journey that tests his physical as well as his emotional strength and Ada’s tale of her own struggles to survive in a harsh landscape and violent time.

Stories of Frazier’s ancestors along with those of the North Carolina mountaineers who were caught up in the frenzy of the war years became the inspiration for the novel. Frazier explains in an interview with Salon, “The story seemed like an American odyssey and it also seemed to offer itself as a form of elegy for that lost world I had been thinking about.” Serving as a model for the fictional Inman was Frazier’s great-great-uncle W. P. Inman, who also turned his back on the war and met a similar fate. Cold Mountain is a moving tribute to those who were lost in the war and those who survived it, as well as a celebration of an indomitable sense of hopeful readiness in confronting the possibilities life holds.

Cold Mountain Summary

the shadow of a crow
Cold Mountain opens in late summer as Inman, a Confederate soldier, lies wounded in a hospital after being hit in the neck during a battle near Petersburg, Virginia. As he does each morning when he wakes, Inman stares out a large open window in front of his bed, imagining scenes from home.

Inman watches a blind man who sells peanuts and newspapers from a cart outside the window. He is surprised to find out that the man has been blind since birth and not through “some desperate and bloody dispute.” When Inman comments on the man’s accepting attitude toward his disability, the man says, “it might have been worse had [he] ever been given a glimpse of the world and then lost it” for this would have turned him “hateful.” Inman insists that is what the war has done to him.

Inman describes the battle that had the greatest effect on him: Fredericksburg. Thousands of Federals were shot down as they charged the wall behind which he and other Confederates had amassed. Inman recalls, “The Federals kept on coming long past the point where all the pleasure of whipping them vanished.” That night, Inman and his fellow soldiers climbed over the wall and took boots off of the dead Federals. He was stunned by the carnage, which included a man killing wounded Federals by hitting them in the head with a hammer. The blind man tells him, “You need to put that away from you,” but Inman cannot prevent the nightmares from returning.

While in the hospital, Inman reads Travels (1791), by naturalist William Bartram, and thinks about the topography of his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, remembering as many details as he can. He walks into town from the hospital to buy clothes and supplies in preparation for escape, for he knows that when he gets better, he will be shipped back to the front lines. He reads in the paper that the government has been hunting down deserters and outliers, men who have evaded Confederate Army service.

Inman thinks about one summer when he was sixteen and herding cattle in the mountains. He met Swimmer there, a sixteen-year-old Cherokee who was also herding in the mountain with a group from his tribe. The two boys spent long hours fishing as Swimmer told stories of “how the world came about and where it is heading.” Swimmer determined the spirit to be “a frail thing, constantly under attack and in need of strength, always threatening to die inside you.” He insisted that one could go to a great forest above heaven where “the dead spirit could be reborn.” Inman decides that Cold Mountain could be such a place, a “healing realm . . . where all his scattered forces might gather.”

Inman starts to write a letter to Ada about his war experiences but tears it up, afraid of what her response would be to what he has seen and done. That night he awakens and steps out of the window.

the ground beneath her hands
During the same period, Ada sits on the porch of her Black Cove home in the shadow of Cold Mountain, trying to write to Inman. She had come here with her father, Monroe, six years earlier when he was asked to preach at the local chapel. Since her father died, she has been alone on their farm with no knowledge about how to run it. Her education has not prepared her for the daily rigors of farm work and the struggle just to survive. As a result, there is little sustenance left. She often seeks out a space inside the boxwoods near the house where she feels safe and cut off from the realities of her new life. That day, after seeking the solace of the hidden space, the farm’s only remaining rooster attacks her there. After she escapes, an overwhelming feeling of helplessness fills her with despair.

She has had little will to improve her situation during the three months since her father died, spending most of her days reading. This day, after placing flowers on Monroe’s grave, she walks to the farm of Sally and Esco Swanger who took her in for a few days after Monroe’s funeral. They talk on the front porch about the war and their growing fear of a man named Teague, the leader of the Home Guard, a cruel band that has been setting its own rules for handling suspected deserters and northern sympathizers. Esco, who has been recording omens, insists that a hard winter is coming.

After Sally and Esco convince Ada to look into their well to see her future, Ada makes out the vague figure of a man, but she cannot tell if he is walking toward or away from her and is confused by its intended significance for her. She soon leaves after receiving a gift of preserves from Sally.

She and Monroe had come to the area to find relief for his consumption. Ada was apprehensive about adapting to the new environment since she had grown up in the genteel atmosphere of Charleston. Ada found little common ground with the mountaineers, whom she found “touchy and distant, largely unreadable” and frequently acting as if she and her father had insulted them.

Deciding to teach Monroe a lesson about judging others too quickly, Esco pretended a complete ignorance of the Bible and acted the part of the country bumpkin. Monroe made it his mission to educate the poor man until Sally took pity on him and told him that he had been the butt of her husband’s and the town’s humor. After Monroe humbly accepted the ironic etiquette lesson, he and Ada began to be more accepted in the community. As a result, Monroe decided to buy the working farm at Black Cove, but since they lived off his Charleston investments, he soon neglected it to the point that after he died, the farm was no longer... » Complete Cold Mountain Summary