Similarly, publishers' deadlines, readers with the leisure and desire for long contact with fictional characters and situations, the rapid writing pace that Cooper set himself, and his honesty in doing what he did best — all were instrumental in evolving the amazing improvisation in this and other novels by Cooper. Here he stays within the confines of frontier adventure and within the form and structure of the novel. But in his professional field, Cooper is as inventive as twentieth-century jazz and modern ballet; and the present-day reader should need only to shift tolerance from one subject and form to another in order to appreciate — and probably enjoy — this early American classic that explores one of our greatest traditions and first bodies forth at its best what is doubtless the American myth.
In The Last of the Mohicans, the frontier is both a place and a condition made up of opposite, usually conflicting forces, for the very nature of a frontier is that it is the demarcating area where things come together with all their differences. In the pervading historical background of the novel is the conflict between civilization and so-called savagism: the wresting of a continent from nature and the Indians. More immediate is the clash between the French and the English for colonial control of the land (the time of the novel is the summer of 1757); and for mercenary help these two nationalities make impermanent, weathercock alliances with already hostile Indians whom Cooper presents as the bad Iroquois stock and the good Delawares and Mohicans of Algonquin stock. The historical confrontation of races is brought into fictional focus with the skirmishes and occasional understandings between individuals and groups of reds and whites, both of whom are in turn at odds with peoples of their own color. One symbolic result is the death of the last offspring of the admirable Mohicans. But what T. S. Eliot would call the "objective correlative" of this problem is also presented dramatically in terms of miscegenation: the tragic mutual love of the noble Indian Uncas and the sentimentalized yet nonetheless worthy Cora Munro, who is also desired by the villain Magua. In the novel, this thematic problem is slow in development — we are, in fact, hardly aware of it until mid-point — and even as it comes into the forefront of action toward the end, it is muted by Cooper at the very time that it becomes the most immediate motivation for the hair-raising events that bring the novel to its close. Without doubt, the novel throughout is one of the bloodiest in American literature, and that tragic bloodshed stems from the fact that, in general historic background and dramatic fictional foreground, human beings are involved in a concept of progress that irresistibly pushes the frontier westward.
