Cold Mountain Literary Terms Journal

1.) Alliteration (page 137)
“Her mind marked every mantis in a stand of ragweed.”
Repetition of “m” at the beginning of words.

2.) Allusion (page 5)
“He seldom spoke more than a word or two at a time, and Inman had learned little more of him than that his name was Balis and that before the war he had been to school at Chapel Hill, where he had attempted to master Greek.
Connects to The Odyssey and the greek gods and goddesses.

3.) Imagery (page 4)
“By now he had stared at the window all through a late summer so hot and wet that the air both day and night felt like breathing through a dishrag, so damp it caused fresh sheets to sour under him and tiny black mushrooms to grow overnight from the limp pages of the book on his bedside table.”
This sentence is so descriptive and appeals to my sense of touch and feeling it makes me feel like it’s a hot and humid summer night again.

4.) Metaphor (page 68)
“[ . . .] gobs of biscuit dough the size of cat heads cooked in the yellow broth.”
The authoru related the size of a cat head and biscuit dough, which are two very different things.

5.) Personification (page 1)
“At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring.”
The author described the flies’ actions with a humane action.

6.) Simile (page 14)
“Every morning after that dream, Inman awoke in a mood as dark as the blackest crow that ever flew.”
The author used the word “as” to compare the meaning of a color to Inman’s mood after having a specific dream.

7.) Symbolism (page 5)
“[. . .] black as the shadow of a crow [. . .]”
Crows are used throughout the novel to symbolize many things, such as freedom and death.

8.) Theme (page 23)
“Cold Mountain nevertheless soared in his mind as a place where all his scattered forces might gather, [. . .] but he did believe that there is a world invisible to us. He no longer thought of that world as heaven, nor did he think that we get to go there when we die. Those teachings had been burned away. [. . .] So he held to the idea of another world, a better place, and he figured he might as well consider Cold Mountain to be the location of it as anywhere.”
This quote shows theme in Cold Mountain because it shows that everyone can easily be changed by war, and Inman was changed for the worse, and that everyone needs a refuge.

9.) Pun (page 118)
“-Crafty as panthers in the way of stealth? Is that the picture you’re painting?”
This quote is a pun because the meaning of a panthers stealthiness and an explanation can be taken many different ways.

10.) Connotation (page 125)
“The stock varied from magnificent to near dead. Backlit by the gold light of afternoon, though, they all looked beautiful to Inman, the grace in the deep curve of their down-turned necks, the frail cannon bones so evident through the thin skin above their fetlocks.
The word “frail” has a negative connotation while the word “thin” has a positive connotation in this quote. “Frail” is a negative connotation because in this quote it is meant as weak, flimsy, and delicate and “Thin” has a positive connotation because in this quote it is meant as slender, which is usually positive.

11.) Hyperbole (page 176)
“For much of the morning Ada had been so dumb with gloom she might as well have worn a black crepe on her sleeve to announce it to the world.”
This quote is a hyperbole because Ada would not literally wear a crepe on her sleeve to announce to the world that she was dumb with gloom that day.

12.) Parallelism (page 137)
“Name two things blooming and two things fruiting.”
This quote is an example of parallelism because fruiting and blooming are basically the same thing in nature, but the author used them as separate things to prove a point.

13.) Syntax (page 29)
“She folded her skirts tightly about her legs, and on hands and knees she worked her way inside the boxwood.”
This specific sentence is an example of a complex sentence. Throughout the novel though, I believe compound sentences were used the most.

14.) Tone (page 2)
“At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman’s eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of roosters in rousing a man to wake. So he came to yet one more day in the hospital ward.”
This quote set the tone of the novel. Frazier very quickly but also with lots of detail, described Inman and the setting.

15.) Point of View (page 35)
“At first, all she liked about the reading spot was the comfortable chair and the good light, but over the months she came to appreciate that the window’s view offered some relief against the strain of such bleak stories, for when she looked up from the page, her eyes swept across the fields and rose on waves of foggy ridges to the blue bulk of Cold Mountain.”
This switch of point of view from Inman’s to Ada’s shows that Ada’s point of view is a lot more comforting, open, and positive than Inmans, dark and dreary point of view in the novel.

16.) Foreshadowing (page 239)
“One crow had feathers missing from both trailing wing edges, identical square notches.”
Throughout the novel, Frazier used crows to foreshadow death and freedom. Though death and freedom are very different, crows can be related to both and also foreshadow both in Cold Mountain.

17.) Onomatopoeia (page 200)
“We’d squat by the stream waiting for the bottle to glug full through it’s narrow neck and then together we’d walk to the church and throw the water on the fire a quart at a time, not so much in hope of putting it out as to be able to say, if asked, that we tried.”
“Glug” is an example of an onomatopoeia in this quote.

18.) Motif (page 14)
“Every morning after that dream, Inman woke in a mood as dark as the blackest crow that ever flew.”
In this quote, “crow” is an example of a motif. It is repeated multiple times throughout the novel and has a deeper meaning than what the word usually means.

19.) Situational Irony (page 445)
“A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead of glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground.”
This quote is an example of situational irony because the reader doesn't expect that Inman dies but he does.

20.) Verbal Irony (page 321)
“It fell asleep in her arms as to a lullaby. The words to the song, though, were no lullaby. They linked up to make a horrible story, a murder ballad called Fair Margaret and Sweet William. It was an old song, but Inman had not heard it before. The lines were these:
I dreamed that my bower was full of red swine,
And my bride bed full of blood.
[. . .] When she finished, there was a long silence broken only by the sound of an owl calling in the dark woods, fit conclusion to songs so burdened with themes of death and solitude and carrying more than a hint of the specter world.”
In this scene, Sara sings songs of a newlywed couple dying, but what she sings put the baby to sleep.

21.) Characterization (page 130)
“He remembered her weight on his legs. The softness of her, and yet the hard angularity of her bones underneath. She had leaned back and rested her head on his shoulder. and her hair smelled of lavender and of herself. Then she sat up and he put his hands to the points of her shoulders and felt the underlayment of muscle and knobby shoulder joints beneath the skin. He pulled her back to him and wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her tight, but she blew out air through her pressed lips and stood and pulled at the wrinkles in the skirt of her dress and reached up to smooth back little rings of hair that had sprung loose at her temples. She turned and looked down at him.”
This very descriptive quote of Ada makes a very good example of Fraziers’ characterization throughout the novel of his characters. He described Ada’s body, dress, and her actions very thoroughly in this quote, allowing the reader to easily imagine the scene.

22.) Metaphor (page 169)
“Skin not much darker than the color of a tanned deerhide, he said. She was a yellow rose.”
In this quote, the author used the color of a tanned deerhide and a yellow rose to describe the color of the woman’s skin.

23.) Personification (page 131)
“The vision of Ada would not loose its grip on his mind, nor did he wish it to.”
This quote is an example of personification because the “vision of Ada” couldn’t “grip on” Inman’s mind. The vision of Ada gripping onto Inman’s mind would be personification because a vision cannot really grip onto someone’s mind.

24.) Simile (page 197)
“She had been brushing it, for it was down nearly to the small of her back, and she held a brush with a tortoiseshell handle. Her face was pale as marble.”
In this quote, the author used “as” to compare the color of her skin to the shade of marble, which is a simile.

25.) Motif (page 216)
“The third sister stood a minute, cupping a hand to her groin and looking across the cornfield, and then she went into the smokehouse and came back with a wood-tined rake.”
Things in triplets have been mentioned multiple times throughout the novel, and there is a deeper meaning to it, like “good things happen in threes”.