Hillary Jordan spins a tale of two families, one white and one black, who find their lives forcibly intertwined in Mudbound. As the story develops, the sons of the two families develop a bond over their military service. The families try to force the sons apart, eventually succeeding in separating the two brothers-in-arms. However, the families are bound together, just as the title Mudbound suggests. The novel revolves around the different ways that the characters are tied to other characters and objects, and like the title indicates, how they are irreversibly bound together.

The bond that is at the center of it all is the friendship between Jamie McAllen and Ronsel Jackson. The story of their friendship is similar to the tale of the romance between Romeo and Juliet. Ronsel and Jamie (who have the same start to their names as Romeo and Juliet) are bound together by their war experiences, and the two families do not approve of their friendship because their different races cannot allow them to associate with each other. The two men continue to remain friends against the wishes of their respective relatives, leading to tensions rising between the McAllen and the Jackson families. When their friendship becomes impossible to ignore any longer, Ronsel has his tongue cut out by a group of Klansmen that includes Jamie’s grandfather. While Jamie does not also get physically harmed, his story ends with tragedy as well. After being forced to decide Ronsel’s cruel fate and later murdering his grandfather, Jamie is emotionally scarred beyond repair and ends up leaving Mudbound. The two are still bound together even when they have separated though. By the end of the novel, it is revealed that both of them have children that they will not get the chance to develop a close paternal relationship with. These two young soldiers are bound together by their refusal to act the way that their families and society expect them to act, just like Romeo and Juliet.

Characters are not only bound to other characters though. Laura finds herself stuck in her mundane life. She feels bound to Henry, bound to the undesirable farm, bound to her role in the household, but she seemingly cannot escape her lot in life. While Laura is able to find a positive tie with the love and compassion that she has for her children, she feels mostly weighted down by the various ways she is bound to other people and objects. Laura takes even more pity on herself because she did not choose to move to the farm. This leads directly into why she sleeps with Jamie; Jamie is an escape from her unhappy life and it is an act that she has a choice in. While she later shows her regret for the choice that she made, she takes responsibility for her choice as she now has a new baby that she can be positively bound to. However, she also declares that she will not let anyone else know the true father of the baby, as she finally seems to feel a slightly more loving bond to her husband.

Jordan also binds the novel together with her writing. Laura opens the novel by saying she is telling a story “with love”. When it is her last segment in the book, she closes the novel “with love” as well. Ronsel ends his chapter, as well as the entire novel, by referring back to his “shine” that almost all of the characters bring up at one point or another. By opening and closing the novels in the same way, Jordan has bound the beginning to the end of the story. This also shows that the characters, while they have lived through significant events, have not changed much from the beginning of the novel as they still tell their own perspective in the same style. Laura may have a kid out of wedlock and Ronsel may have been maimed by a mob of white supremacists, but at the core of their personalities, not much has greatly changed.

The title of Jordan’s Mudbound carries a high amount of significance in the novel. Throughout the story, the characters face dilemmas because of the other characters or objects that they did not choose to be bound to. Laura feels stuck and bound to her unpleasant farm life, and Jamie cannot deny the connection that he feels with Ronsel. Hillary Jordan even reflects this concept of being bound to other people or objects through her writing by opening and closing various storylines the same way. By choosing to title her work Mudbound, Jordan shows how the bonds that people have in their lives can greatly affect the events and decisions people face on a daily basis.