The common thread I’m seeing in many of these blog posts about Cold Mountain is the reaction to Charles Frazier’s excessive analysis and description of everything around him. Inman, one of the main characters in the novel, seems to always be searching for a deeper meaning besides the physical, and we see an example this in the first chapter of the novel when he says, “Inman did not consider himself to be a superstitious person, but he did believe that there is a world invisible to us. He no longer thought of that world as heaven, nor did he still think that we get to go there when we die. Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul.”

Personally, I think that is a trait to be desired. Beautiful things, things that make you think and make you feel, will not always shout their existence. Many times you have to look for lovely. Anyone can look at a sunset in awe, but it takes someone of deeper understanding to see the story in mundane things and know that they are good.

Another thing that makes Cold Mountain stand out against other books with themes of war is the perspective Charles Frazier chooses to use. Instead of the main focus being on the blood, gore, and pain of battle from a male perspective as we might expect, a large part of the perspective is given by the women and others who were left at home. They are experiencing war times, but they themselves are not at war or even seeing the war. Even still, they are feeling the war and its effects.