Acquaintance with the entire Leather-Stocking series gives one the fullest awareness of the stature and meaning of Hawkeye, but both qualities are apparent in The Last of the Mohicans through Hawkeye's singular uprightness, his wide renown across the plains and forests, and his rather aloof involvement in the actions of the story. It is, in fact, his combination of ideals and aloofness that fits him to be Cooper's commentator on the beauties and perversities of nature and human life. He is too good to be an actuality, but he is as living as any just ideal can be, even after he and his frontier have vanished. Thus, to a great extent due to Cooper, the idea of a Natty Bumppo remains, carrying with it that hazy degree of reality, truth, and effectiveness that is the province of myth.
The novel, never meant to be realistic in any strict sense, is of course filled out with a profusion of other conventions and motifs. Cooper's appreciation for primeval nature is obvious in the choice of modulated phrasing and in the descriptive accuracy of his scenes. When he goes into detail about tracking fugitives through the forests, he is both recognizing and fulfilling the typical American interest in know-how. Features of the sentimental novel with its excessively emotional view of experience abound. And though it is sporadic and sometimes heavy-handed, humor too is not lacking, for the traditional comic Yankee character finds a role here in David Gamut. But all of these elements and others in the novel are subsumed by the dominant serious theme. For the story of The Last of the Mohicans, the episodic adventures are the appropriate fictional clothing, while the conventional sentimental love represents the alluring piping. The vibrant thematic life underneath all this, with an ultimately doomed Hawkeye at the center, is the condition of the frontier with its heroics, its bloodshed, and its tragedy.
