Cold Mountain is told in the third-person past tense by a skilled wordsmith who is acutely sympathetic to the goal of the protagonists, Inman and Ada, to be reunited on Cold Mountain. The narrator follows their day-to-day activities--the one trekking through forests and flatlands, avoiding contact with hostile Home Guards and meeting a variety of characters, sympathetic and not and the other learning to survive on a farm after being raised a perfect gentlewoman who is also privy to their inner thoughts. Both protagonists struggle with the meaning of the Civil War, rejecting it as a senseless waste of life and fortune and with how 4 years of separation have changed them, perhaps rendering them no longer attractive to the other. The narrator obviously roots for Inman, Ada, and Ruby and for Stobrod.....
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