In a topic-driven, well-developed, and tightly
focused paragraph, develop a single connection between Inman’s journey and
Louise Cowan’s “The Hero and the Underworld.” Be specific. Use examples both
from Cowan’s essay and Frazier’s novel.
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Amanda McMahon
ReplyDeleteProf. Kirk
ENGL 3553
20 October 2015
Inman vs. Hero of the Underworld
In Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain, the protagonist, Inman, undergoes a harsh journey in order to return home that echoes the experience that Louise Cowan describes in "The Hero and the Underworld." Inman's journey begins while he fights in the Civil War for four years and continues as he deserts the cause and travels home. Inman's journey home can be described as an Underworld experience because it is "something not resembling ordinary life" and "it is fraught with danger, ordeals, and revelations" (Cowan 3). From the beginning of his travel home, Inman felt that "his spirit... had been blasted away so that he had become loneson and estranged from all around him as a sad old heron standing pointless watch in the mudflats of a pond lacking frogs" (Frazier 16). His empty feeling is described by Cowan as "the infinitude and blankness of deep space" (1). Inman continues to travel, not because he has hope, but because, in order to live, he must reach the end of the road. Cowan states that "the struggle [the hero] undertake[s] is motivated by the attempt to endure and prevail, despite all odds" (8). Inman faces death many times and one of those times he is literally buried, but still finds it within him to rise up and continue. And he does emerge from the underworld. Inman states that "there was a redemption of some kind... in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long differed" (Frazier 334).
Callie Brothers
ReplyDeleteProf. Kirk
ENGL 3553
20 October 2015
Inman's Journey vs. Hero of the Underworld
As Frazier describes Inman's journey throughout his novel, Cold Mountain, Frazier paints a dark picture of a journey that will never be forgotten. This journey in which Inman takes becomes parallel with the picture that Cowan paints in The Hero of the Underworld. Inman truly cannot be killed. He truly has the life span of an immortal. His journey causes him to see eye to eye with death, yet fights to keep pushing back home. "The beasts of it chased after him in a dark wood, and there was not place one for sanctuary no matter where he turned. All the world of that dark realm gathered dire and intent against lone him, and everything about it was grey and black, but for teeth and claws as white as the moon." (Frazier 311) Cowen describes almost a dark place just like Inman sees. Cowan says, "Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see the lost are like this, and their scourge to be as I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse." (11)
Frazier and Cowan both describe places in which certain people (characters) fall into with their journey through life. Frazier and Cowan paint deep, dark pictures in which every imagination falls into. Their is no place like home, yet their is no place like the journey back home either.
Mikkaela Bailey
ReplyDeleteProf. Kirk
ENGL 3353
21 October 2015
Inman as the Hero of the Underworld
In her essay “The Hero and the Underworld,” Louise Cowan comes to the conclusion that the underworld experience is necessary to shape the individual into whom he or she is meant to be, just as the protagonist Inman is transformed through his journey in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. Cowan summarizes her thoughts on the value of this “underworld experience” and its prominence in literature by saying, “Suffering is an action so powerful as to remake the self; it can be avoided; one can deaden oneself sufficiently as to bypass it; but when it is undertaken, it is an act of redeeming the world, not just oneself” (15). Throughout the duration of his journey, Inman feels as though he is a wandering ghostly figment slowly dissipating: “The invisible world, he declared to himself, had abandoned him as a gypsy soul to wander singular, without guide or chart, through a broken world composed of little but impediment” (Frazier 231). Inman feels unworthy of redemption, but continues to search on for what must be better than the suffering of war and wandering (311). He finds himself up against terrible odds at every turn, yet manages to overcome because of his character and sense of morality that stay with him though all notions of glory and the draw of lawlessness the war provided have long since left him (276). Inman goes through the underworld Cowan discusses, and he comes through his experiences as a shadow of who he was before; however, he maintains the core of his identity, which is simply a good man.
Kelsey Wheatle
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
ENGL 3353
12 October 2015
Inman's Journey Vs. The Underworld
In Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain", we are introduced to the protagonist Inman, who begins his journey home, to escape the dark and grim results of the war. Louise Cowan's essay 'The Hero and the Underworld" directly echoes Inman's journey by describing Western literature as an 'alien realm, another kind of reality, something not resembling ordinary life. And always it is fraught with danger, ordeals, and revelations"(3). "Cold Mountain", which is a type of Western literature, uses Inman to describe the war scenes which deal a lot with blood and death; a type of alien realm that is fraught with danger. In her essay, Cowan also speaks about the futility of tasks, and pursing a hopeless goal. This can directly contrast the hope that Inman has of returning home. Although Inman felt that he would be killed getting home he thrived with the pursuit of happiness that he would be able to reunite with Ada. "Such an imagined scene of homecoming had been the hope in his heart"(313). Inman's journey back to Cold Mountain is explicitly explained through Cowan's essay because although Inman's journey from the Underworld, and into another dark realm, his homecoming journey, Inman is able to shed the person he was while fighting in the war, and make a "slow progress toward wisdom"( Cowan 15). Inman's slow progress towards wisdom is his becoming his own man and having the courage to face adversity, maintain his dignity, and complete his journey.
In Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Inman undergoes a similar journey to the one being described by Louise Cowan in the Hero and the Underworld. Inman's journey can be characterized as being a "hopeless journey" where he knowingly pursues an unattainable goal, similar to other heroes in western culture (7). It is a "hopeless quest" that Inman enters into dauntingly. Similarly, journeys made by heroes into the underworld had to be made knowingly because no one else would dare venture there. The journeys made by these heroes and by Inman himself are symbolic of a descent into nature and into one's true self. Before beginning his journey, Inman recalls that he "had viewed the world as if it were a picture framed by the molding around the window" (7). Now, however, he has entered a different reality where he sees "something monstrous" all around him, all the time, just as one would expect to see in the underworld to which he has inevitably journeyed.
ReplyDeleteSadie Wyant
ReplyDeleteProfessor Kirk
ENGL 3353
21 October 2015
Inman: Hero of the Underworld
In Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain, Inman can be described as a hero of the underworld. This term is penned by Louise Cowan in her paper “The Hero and the Underworld.” After leaving the hospital, Inman begins on a journey through death to reach a beacon of hope and life: Ada. One passage says, “He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them” (last third of “to live like a gamecock”). Inman pushes through all the despair and death that he sees, even growing used to it. This relates to some of Cowan’s points about the hero of the underworld. After describing one poem, Cowan says, “The speaker is well aware of the futility of the task and of his own quixotic action in pursuing a hopeless goal” (5). In this way, though Inman strives toward reaching Ada, he is still aware of how hopeless his quest is. Though he has a fantastical view of how he wants their reuniting scene to play out, there is an undercurrent of awareness that things will not go as he wants them to.