`Cold Mountain` by Charles Frazier

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Epigraph of Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier is a story of a wounded Confederate soldier , W .

. Inman , on his journey home to the mountains and to his love , Ada Monroe . This novel is believed to be partly based on the author 's great-great-grandfather 's own experiences as a Confederate soldier as stated in The Best Novels of the Nineties : A Reader 's Guide (Lesher 210 . According to the Encyclopedia of American War Literature it is amply praised for its humane and hopeful vision of healing and

br love in the midst of chaos and destruction (Allred 126 . But what is the real genre of this story ? Critics have labeled it with so many names , as a picaresque , a historical novel , a narrative of quest , a tragedy , a love story , and many more . On the purpose of analyzing and understanding this literary piece , I will use the critical essays written by Brent Gibson titled Cold Mountain as spiritual quest : Inman 's redemptive journey and On the Trail to Cold Mountain by Kathryn Stripling Byer

Classifying a novel to a particular genre or comparing it to another literary work sometimes limits the readers from perceiving the different literary elements but is a good start to comprehend the context of the story . Both Gibson and Byer used the book 's epigraph-- "Men ask the way to Cold Mountain / Cold Mountain : there 's no through trail " - to describe how hard it is for critics to find a particular genre for this piece . Gibson openly stated that this epigraph might be a metaphor for critics trying to uncover the novel 's genre while Byer , pondering on the story , illustrated the difficulty of categorizing the novel as reaching the summit of Cold Mountain itself . Although , they deemed that the novel is not a picaresque since Gibson claimed that Inman is a dynamic character who grew and changed through his journey rather than a static character who had a series of episodic , unconnected adventures , and Inman was surely no rogue out seeking adventure for its own sake ' as affirmed by Byer . In addition , Gibson believed that this novel is more of a comedy rather than a tragedy even if the novel 's ending is the death of Inman since he was triumphant in his journey and his dying vision was a concrete proof of his redemption

Brent Gibson and Kathryn Stripling Byer both consider this novel as a narrative , specifically , a narrative of quest ' for Gibson and a narrative tour de force ' for Byer . Gibson used Thomas Foster 's definition that a quest narrative as a journey of self-knowledge in which the quester may or may not know the true purpose of the quest and he compared Cold Mountain to another narrative of spiritual quest Pilgrim 's Progress . Inman , like the Christians , is in a pilgrimage and was in a quest for faith which was lost in the war and was being recovered throughout the story though he was not...