Book:

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Movie:
Here are some quotes from the movie:

Ada: If you are fighting, stop fighting. If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me .... come back to me is my request.

Every piece of this is man's bullshit. They call this war a cloud over the world, but they made the weather and stand in the rain and say shit, it's raining.

Look at the sky now. What color is it? Or the way a hawk flies. Or you  wake up and your ribs are bruised thinking so hard on somebody. What do you call that? 

How can a name, not even a real name, break your heart?

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Discussion questions:

1. How would you describe the style, or the voice, in which Charles Frazier tells his story? Do you find it realistic or stylized? What does it add to the overall effect of the story?

2. Charles Frazier has based his novel loosely on Homer's Odyssey. If you are familiar with The Odyssey, which incidents from it do you find reproduced in Cold Mountain, and how has Frazier reimagined them? Why do you think he might have chosen this structure for a Civil War novel? How is Inman like Odysseus? Was the structure of the Odyssey used in the movie as well?

3. With Inman leaving the army just like that, Charles Frazier seems to imply that, because of the moral barrenness of the Civil War and the crimes committed on the battlefield in the name of honor, there is no moral onus attached to the act of desertion. Do you agree with him? Why has Frazier chosen to portray the deserters as good, the Home Guard as evil? How was this moral dilemma dealt with in the movie?

4. How have Inman's views on secession, slavery, and war changed by the time he finds himself in the military hospital? What has he come to believe of both sides, the Federals and the Confederates, their leaders, and their motivations for fighting? How does the fighting and the level of blind violence in the Civil War compare with other, more recent wars? How are the war and both sides - Federal and Confederate - portrayed in the movie?

5. Both Ada and Ruby were motherless children from the time they were born. How has that state affected their characters and formed their ideas? How has it molded their relationships with their fathers? Do both women reconcile themselves to their fathers in the end, and if so, why? Is there a difference between the book and the movie at this point? Why?

6. In the book, Inman remembers a conversation he had with a boy he met after the battle of Fredericksburg, when he pointed out Orion's principal star. The boy replied, "That's just a name we give it. . . .It ain't God's name." We can never know God's name for things, the boy continues; "It's a lesson that sometimes we're meant to settle for ignorance". How does this statement correspond with the lessons learned by Ada and Ruby? What point does Cold Mountain make about the nature and limitations of human knowledge?

7. How does Frazier portray the natural world in the book: as benign, treacherous, cruel, or indifferent? Famous contemporaries of Inman and Ada--thinkers like Darwin, Wordsworth, and Emerson--were expressing new ideas, in poetry and prose, about nature. How do these ideas influence Monroe's thinking? "Monroe had commented that, like all elements of nature, the features of this magnificent topography were simply tokens of some other world, some deeper life with a whole other existence toward which we ought aim all our yearning". What very different conclusions does Ada come to? How do Inman and Ruby view the natural world? What is the message about the natural world in the movie?

8. Several of Cold Mountain's characters meet their death during the course of the novel/ movie. How do these characters' deaths reflect, or redeem, their lives? What points are made by the particular deaths of Veasey, Ada's suitor Blount, Pangle, Monroe, and others?

9. Stobrod claims not to be Ruby's true father; his wife, he says, was impregnated by a heron. What other mythical or animistic images do the book offer and the movie portray, and what is their purpose? How does Frazier view, and treat, the supernatural?

10 What is the significance of the Cherokee woman's story about the Shining Rocks? What does it mean to Inman, and why is Ada skeptical? What does her reaction tell us about her character? How is this story incorporated in the movie?

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