Themes: The Meaninglessness of War

Inman determines that the men of the mountain areas in North Carolina went to war “to drive off invaders” whom they felt would threaten their way of life. Ruby had thought that the North “was a godless land, or rather a land of only one god, and that was money.” The people of Cold Mountain, however, soon discover that they are fighting someone else’s war—those who want to protect a system that requires the subjugation of an entire race to...

Themes: Recognition of Randomness and the Search for Order

Disorder permeates war, concerning who wins and who loses, who lives and who dies. Inman “had seen so much death it had come to seem a random thing entirely.” In an effort to find some sort of order, he looks in the bottom of his coffee cup before he starts out on his journey, “as if pattern told something worth knowing,” but he determines that “anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other.” This sense is reinforced...

Themes: Love and Connection with the Natural World

Inman's and Ada's few days of joy snowbound together in the deserted Indian village bring to fruition their love for each other. But more fundamentally those days bring to fruition the mature, unsentimental love of the natural world that has been growing in each character.

Themes: Celebration of Simple Lives and Rejection of Romanticized Ideals

Cold Mountaincelebrates the simple lives of subsistence farmers and woodsmen, ways of life nearly as old as the human race. It celebrates but does not romanticize the labor the earth requires to yield sustenance to those whose regular habits and careful attention can learn to cooperate with the seasons. In doing so it must reject competing visions of life, those full of destructive ideals and a thirst for unwholesome extremes. Ada's memory of the...

Themes: Spirituality in the Natural World

Frazier's is a reverent book, but it is not a religious one. It is a book that asserts the spiritual but not the supernatural. Ada, Inman, and Ruby are skeptical about an afterlife. But if they are skeptical about the next world, they do believe in a spiritualized natural world, a world whose apparently infinite connections and cycles imply a spiritual force animating the material.

Themes: Change and Healing

The book is also about change, about the necessity for individual people to open themselves to the flux and complexity of life and the unavoidable dangers of doing so. Both Ada and Inman express fear that they will never be able to connect with things and people outside themselves. Inman has been "stunned" by the war. His neck wound is the outward symbol of his inner wound. At the beginning of the novel, he has a condition that has been called in...

Themes: Personal Growth and Connection with the Natural World

At the beginning of the novel, Ada's situation parallels Inman's. Her ability to allow the natural world into her mind and heart, to connect with its cycles and seasons, has been damaged not by the war but by her upbringing. Only after her father's death does she begin to see the world directly, rather than through the lenses of books.

Themes: Rejection of Modernist Views on Love and Redemption

In the logic of Frazier's novel, neither brutish naturalism nor escapist supernaturalism can yield a satisfactory life. The spiritual is to be found...