3053's review :| week 1

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3053’s review :| Cold Mountain         Week: 1 Date: 24/07/22 Chapter(s): 1

Summary of my reading:

On the morning of the new day in the North Carolina hotel, the man, Inman, one of the reinforcements got terrible pain during the civil war. He’s waking by the touching of flies around the long wound on his neck. He takes some time to stare through the tall window and remembers several nostalgias of himself when he was younger. Back then, When he sat under the tree in the field and just looked at his dad doing his job. When he was just a student who didn’t pay attention to the history class and attempted to skip it. But now on, he has to stay in the hospital because of the way that he was forced to choose, being one of the soldiers who killed a thousand of the Feds’ army and receiving the thing he had done by being haunted by the bodies that lay on the war field.

Memory had passed after that day, he was walking on the street with the fear that he would be sent back to the war because his legs were fast healing, though his neck still badly hurt. He spent some money that he gained from the army's pay, so he brought some clothes that he needed and stopped by the coffee house. He sat and had a cup of coffee, then he read the newspaper that he had bought to find something interesting for him. As he wanted, he noticed the Cherokee Indians had been fighting with the Feds, Inman put the paper down with his worried if his friend, Swimmer, was among the men who were fighting. They are friends since the summer before he had to join the military. One day in the morning, Inman with Swimmer went to cover the fish. Swimmer started talking in a low voice that sounds like psychology and supernatural at the same time such as; The stories of animals and how they became as they are or told him that he saw man’s spirit as a weak thing, constantly under attack, always threatening to die inside. After many days because the weather turned bad so the two camps have to separate. Now Inman hoped his friend wasn’t out for fighting with the Feds. Inman raised his coffee cup to take a sip but found it cold and nearly run out. He guessed that Swimmer was right to say that the man’s spirit could die while his body still continued living.

As Inman was thinking of his loss stories, one of Swimmer rushed into his memory. Once when Swimmer said that above the blue sky there was a forest that Men could go but a dead spirit could be reborn. Now as Inman just sat in the coffee house, Cold Mountain came to his mind as a place where his spirit might be healed, he was not wasting any time. He started taking off his new black coat and writing a letter. The point of that letter was he was trying to contact someone and saying that the things that he had done, it was terrific to do. He stood up and folded the letter then walk down the street to mail the letter and back to the hospital with his stronger leg. After supper, Inman checked the knapsack under his bed. There was a blanket in his bag already, so he added a few camping things to his bag. In next morning, he rose and dressed up in his new clothes with his knapsack as well and went to the tall open window, looked out, and stepped out the window.

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My opinion:

The first chapter of Cold Mountain is so good because the writer wrote the beginning of the story so well and it was easy to illustrate the main character in this chapter. We could see how the character feels and what thing he has gone through until he ends up like this, and it was more attractive in the way the writer tries to relate the point of this journey to go to Cold Mountain. The way that the author describes all of the situations with his own language, it was so clear and deep, so I can get the feeling of being among the war and being frightening by the bodies, also his memories in the past as well. The writer’s language in this chapter made me feel everything like in the past I miss it, but nowadays I am sick of it being sent to death. If I were Inman, I would do the same thing as him even though I’m not getting any wound on my neck.