Point of View

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 and Veasey to stop being the reprehensible characters they are and revels in the...