Inman's Spiritual Journey in Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain is a popular book and movie written by Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain is a book about two lovers, Inman and Ada, during the Civil War, who depart on separate journeys in hopes of reuniting with one another. The novel is viewed as the physical journey of Inman from the Civil War to Cold Mountain and the inner journey of Ada, but people neglect the sheer importance that Inman’s spiritual journey has on the book. Inman’s physical journey is really non-connected episodes that are linked together by the thread that is Inman’s spiritual sense. Inman regains his spiritual sense, gradually, through the entire novel ending where he achieves redemption and self-completeness with his death. Inman’s journey is that of a spiritual sense where he crosses the void from the world of war to the world of spiritual belief which he left behind at Cold Mountain.

Evidence of Inman’s spiritual journey is found throughout the book. Inman’s spiritual journey is really a journey of recovering his spiritual beliefs that he lost from the Civil War. For instance, he states that General Lee, “made it clear he looked on war as an instrument for clarifying God’s obscure will” (12). Inman tries to distance himself from Lee’s belief as it troubles him the most. He also believed that “following such logic would soon lead one to declare the victor of every brawl and dogfight as God’s certified champion” (12). Thus both the horror of war and the inconsistency of the Christian witness he has received leads him to reject what he had been taught without having anything to put in its place. His journey then becomes clearly spiritual as he tries to find something, if anything, to replace his rejected beliefs.

Inman begins his journey as both physically and spiritually decimated. He tells the blind man in front of the hospital that he has been turned “hateful” by what he has seen. In describing his own spiritual condition, he uses words like "torn apart" "burned out" "empty," "blasted" "lonesome" "estranged" and even "dead":

Inman guessed Swimmer’s spells were right in saying a man’s spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living…He himself a case point…his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking. Feeling empty, however, as the core of a big black gum tree…It seemed a poor swap to find that the only way one might keep from fearing death was to act numb and set apart as if dead already (22).

In fact, Inman doubts that he will ever “heal up and feel whole” again (25). These excerpts show that Inman sees himself as spiritually incomplete.

It’s also evident that Inman has a spiritual reawakening from the sheer change he makes from the beginning of the book compared to the end. At the beginning of the book, Inman saw his spirit as “blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him as a sad old heron standing pointless watch in the mudflats of a pond lacking frogs” (22). Inman clearly states his ravaged spiritual state and shows that he doesn’t believe in easy answers to the problems of life like the Christians around him who do not show a connection between their beliefs and their actions. This type of Christian is demonstrated through Veasey, a preacher who impregnates his black lover and tries to kill her to cover it up. At the end of the book, Inman finds that life is worth living for when he’s reunited with Ada, and making love to Ada lets him realize this: He had been living like a dead man and this was life before him (430). This drastic change of thinking life is meaningless to thinking life is full of meaning shows Inman’s spiritual journey.

Inman’s journey is seen as spiritual since he’s not only struggling with his inner demons, but with God himself. Inman feels like “God’s most marauded bantling” (69). To be marauded is to be raided, violated, or abused. Bantling is a young child but could refer to a bastard. Inman expresses that he feels like an abused child of God, God’s marauded bantling. Another example is Inman’s conversation with the blind man. He found out that the blind man was born blind, so he wonders “How did you find someone to hate for a thing that just was?” (17). One possible answer is, of course, God himself. Inman blames God for things that have happened