Hospitality and Quid Pro Quo Theme Analysis

Because Cold Mountain is a quest story like the Odyssey, its “episodes” keep coming back to the same scenario: a host offering hospitality to a weary traveler. Most of the time, the weary traveler is Inman, stopping for the night along the road back to Black Cove. But at other times, the traveler is passing by Ada Monroe and Ruby Thewes’s farm in Black Cove, and the situation is more or less the same: Ada and Ruby provide him with food and shelter for a few nights. The theme of hospitality is important to Cold Mountain because it links together the two halves of the novel. Whether we’re reading about Inman traveling along the road or Ada and Ruby on their farm in Black Cove, there’s an unwritten code of hospitality in the characters’ world.

The main rule of hospitality in Cold Mountain is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s always a quid pro quo (an exchange, literally “something for something”) when a host offers to take care of a traveler for the night. The host will give the traveler food and shelter, but the traveler needs to provide something in return. Sometimes, the “something” is a literal object—for instance, Inman offers the mysterious Junior an expensive saw in return for food and a bed for the night. But most of the time, the traveler’s payment is less literal. Stobrod Thewes “pays” for his housing in Black Cove by playing beautiful fiddle music for Ruby Thewes, his daughter, and Ada Monroe. A lot of the time, the payment is information, or emotional companionship—when Inman shacks up with Sara, for instance, he simultaneously accepts Sara’s generosity and repays his debt by offering her some desperately needed male companionship. Even the Old Woman who cares for Inman’s wounds wants something from Inman—news of the outside world.

In times of war, the quid pro quo of hospitality is an important, almost sacred rule of many societies. This means that to break the rules of hospitality is almost a sin. Sure enough, the most repellant characters in the novel, such as Junior, are the same characters who violate their end of the code of hospitality—Junior gives Inman food and shelter, but then betrays Inman to the soldiers of the Home Guard, who nearly kill Inman. Not coincidentally, Junior is also one of the few characters in Cold Mountain who’s portrayed as unambiguously evil—he’s an adulterer, and also possibly a cannibal.

At several points in Cold Mountain, the characters discuss the unreliability of money during the Civil War. But while money changes its value over time, the basic rules of hospitality stay intact and universally acknowledged (so that the few characters who break the rules are portrayed as evil). In a way, hospitality is the “currency” of the novel—the one thing that stays the same, in an era when everything else is in flux.