Salvation in Motion: Translocal Narrative and Liminality, Compassion, Embodied Perception in Cold Mountain

Abstract

Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain takes the main line of Inman crossing the front line of the Civil War and rushing to his hometown to reunite with Ada. It describes the protagonist’s complete journey of embarking on the road of return with obsession and completing self-spiritual reshaping in wandering all the way. The existing relevant research mostly relies on the static habitat theory to interpret the home narrative, and few of them explore its intrinsic essence from the perspective of translocal narrative. This article takes the perspective of translocal narrative as the starting point to carry out text analysis, and carries out text analysis along the level of “liminal situation – compassion – embodied perception”: the Civil War broke the stable survival pattern, and Inman was forced to rush to the front-line battlefield and became a mobile individual who continued to shuttle in various places. All kinds of temporary transition fields on the long way back to his hometown gradually dissolved the identity barriers of Inman, allowing him to have a deep intersection with all kinds of strange passers-by and constantly nourish the ethics of compassion in his heart. And the physical pain, natural coldness and warmth brought by the trek all the way, and other concrete embodied feelings infiltrated his heart layer by layer, gradually soothing the mental trauma left by the war. Inman’s long-cherished wish to go to Cold Mountain and reunite with Ada runs through the whole text, and his inner spiritual transformation does not come from the reunion at the end, but from the cognitive reshaping created by liminal situations, compassionate ethics, and embodied experience. Frazier intertwines the narrative of returning home, travel opportunities and physical feelings, revealing that the fluid transition space is an important medium for characters to complete their spiritual growth. The multi-dimensional analysis based on this textual characteristic has also supplemented a new analytical perspective for the translocal narrative interpretation of war-themed novels.