The Quest to Return Home Theme Analysis

In interviews, Charles Frazier has acknowledged Cold Mountain’s debt to Homer’s Odyssey, one of the foundational works of Western literature (see Background Info for more on this work). Unsurprisingly, Frazier’s novel touches on one of the oldest themes in the Western canon (and the key theme of the Odyssey): the quest to return home. Inman, the novel’s main character, spends most of the book trying to walk back to his hometown of Black Cove, where the love of his life, Ada Monroe, still lives. It’s worth thinking about why and how Inman goes about his quest.

The first question we need to think about is why Inman wants to return to his home so badly—why walk hundreds of miles, risking his life? This is an especially tough question to answer, since Inman himself never explicitly states his reason for wanting to go home. It’s easy to surmise that Inman is afraid of being sent back into battle as soon as he recovers from his wounds. And yet Inman’s reason for wanting to return to Black Cove, specifically, is a little different. Black Cove is Inman’s home—he’s lived there all his life. One reason that Inman loves Black Cove is that, as far as he can tell, it never changes: Cold Mountain (the mountain near Black Cove) will always be Cold Mountain. In the midst of a terrifying, traumatic war, Inman wants to return to Black Cove to remind himself of who he was before. He wants to forget about the Civil War and carry on with his life, uninterrupted. But there’s also another reason why Inman wants to return: he wants to move forward with his relationship with Ada Monroe, whom he’d been in love with before he was shipped off to battle. The key point here is that Inman’s quest to return to Black Cove is intimately personal. With every step he takes toward his home, Inman reminds us, and reminds himself, of his identity: his lifelong connection to the town, and his passionate love for Ada. Even if we can’t exactly understand Inman’s connection to Black Cove itself, we can all understand his desire to go home, and in this way, Inman’s quest for home makes him a sympathetic and believable character.

One interesting feature of quest narratives, beginning with the Odyssey (and extending through Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, and even Apocalypse Now) is their episodic structure. In Cold Mountain, Inman’s encounters along the road to Black Cove have an episodic, self-contained quality. The characters he meets along the way often disappear from the novel after one or two chapters; i.e., after Inman moves on with his quest (notable exceptions include Teague, the leader of the Home Guard, and Solomon Veasey, the priest). The “thread” connecting these brief, chapter-long encounters together is Inman himself. This quality of the novel suggests all kinds of interesting questions, most notably, “How do the ‘episodes’ challenge or change Inman?” As the novel goes on, it becomes clear that Inman’s encounters with strangers along the road back to Black Cove test his commitment to his quest. With every life-threatening encounter, Inman’s devotion to Ada becomes more impressive—it’s easy to imagine a weaker man giving up on the quest entirely. By the time we get to the end of the book, then, Inman’s “episodes” have had an undeniable impact on his character: they’ve made him strong, mature, and even heroic.