Themes

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.

Cold Mountain celebrates 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 Savannah boy Blount who weeps with fear before enlisting and Inman's memories of Marye's Heights— these are moments when the novel examines and finds wanting the Southern...