Cold Mountain: Fate

In Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, he portrays a certain view of the world’s way of creating fate. Within Inman’s stories of the deadly Civil War and gloomy passage home through Cold Mountain, Inman begins to think that there’s not much he can do in his fate. While he is in the hospital he recounts a few of the battles he wishes to never relive but he doesn’t know if he can help that: “It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat… if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker… we’ll be eating one another raw” (16). Frazier ultimately shows what war can do to a man. Inman seemed at least content in the flashbacks in the village with Ada but war has shown him what humans are capable of doing to each other and he has lost hope in the world. He never chose to go to war and it has changed him. I think he realizes how much more brutal and violent he is and part of it is due to his underlining anger that he doesn’t believe that whatever he does, he won’t have an effect on his fate. Though further through his trek home, the readers can see how his heart is what leading him without him knowing. He repeatedly helps people because he knows that is the right thing to do and he still has the strong determination to get home to Ada. I think he wants to defy the world of “random sweepings” (18) who’s aim is to drag you down and he will do anything to prove himself stronger than the world’s dreadful version of his destiny.