Context
Cold Mountain, Charles
Frazier's debut novel, won critical acclaim and the National Book
Award for fiction when it was published in 1997.
As an author of travel books and short stories, Frazier had ample
experience in writing about landscapes and using a condensed prose style.
Frazier applied these literary skills in crafting Cold Mountain's
episodic structure and detailed descriptive passages. Frazier's prose
draws on the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scope
of southern novels by authors such as William Faulkner, and the
appreciation of nature expressed in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Frazier
lives in North Carolina, and his choice of Cold Mountain's setting
along the Blue Ridge Mountains conveys his profound identification
with this hallowed terrain.
The epic novel charts its course through the troubled
waters of nineteenth-century American history. The action is set
in 1864, three years after the outbreak of
the Civil War, in an era of discord between North and South. Although
the war is essentially a backdrop for events, it is clear that Inman's
experiences as a Confederate soldier have profoundly affected his
understanding of the world and have resurrected his dormant spiritual
anxieties. Many characters tell tales of hardship and despair, some
of which are war stories. These tales help develop the themes of
displacement and exile that define the novel.
Frazier suggests that the war damaged Southerners both
personally and politically. Frazier's characters are rarely supportive
of one side or another. After three years of conflict, many are
disillusioned with what they consider to be the selfish motivations
of both sides. In particular, the inhabitants of Cold Mountain are
presented as guarded, insular, and narrow-minded.
Frazier examines the issue of slavery in the context
of the war, but as a backdrop to central events. The characters
are racially diverse, but the novel tends to focus on white society.
Frazier incorporates the cruel treatment meted out to slaves by
Southern landowners into more general themes like human suffering
and hope for a better future. Frazier is more interested in Inman
and Ada's relationship to each other and to the landscape than he
is in the politics of the era, leaving us to decide whether he shortchanges
historical events. The novel is most effective in capturing the
spirit of two people searching for self-knowledge and romantic fulfillment.
The book is also effective in presenting a view of nineteenth-century
Americans' relationship to the land. Inman's obsessive drive westward
is an expression of his freedom of spirit. When he is forced to
retrace his steps east by the military, Inman feels as though life
is slipping away from him. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in his essay “Walking,”
(1862), “The future lies [west] to me. .
. . Eastward I go by force; but westward I go free.” Frazier's novel
is set on the verge of a new era, and Inman seems to symbolize the
independence of spirit and dynamic will of those who will later
lay claim to the West.
Although he touches upon the issue of migration westward
as well as the trauma of Civil War experiences, Frazier refrains
from coming to any definitive political conclusions in his novel.
Instead, Cold Mountain examines the evolution of
human relationships in tandem with the seasonal changes and variations
of the natural world. Although set in the Civil War era, Frazier's
work deals primarily with the timeless search for self-realization.
