Cooper's overall structure is a simple one: two long chase sequences with a short, suspenseful interlude between them. Like any good edifice with its division into rooms, windows, etc., the novel's structure must be supported by constituent patterned details, the decoration of which will vary according to the taste of the builder or the taste to which he is appealing. Each of Cooper's chases, then, is patterned as pursuit-capture-escape-and-pursuit, a technique to which he gives vitality with variations such as letting the pursuers and the pursued change roles. Since, because of the great importance of theme, decoration may be as significant as anything else in the novel, it is often difficult to decide whether an element is pattern or decoration. From the limited standpoint of plot alone, however, we may hazard that Cooper is purposely decorating his supporting patterns when he regularly follows a scene of blood and violence with a calm scene in which the natural world reasserts itself as death is always succeeded by regeneration. Such presentations as Indian customs and rifle lore stand forth primarily as decoration, though they also give substance to the people involved or described. Even the characterizations themselves take on a decorative quality since Cooper only intermittently (with David Gamut, for instance) dwells upon developmental change in character. Thus in The Last of the Mohicans, plot is a bit more complex and complicated than it at first appears: decorative form germinates within patterned form, which in turn germinates within the overall structural form. All of this, moving forward together because of suspenseful conflict which seeks and reaches a resolution, is Cooper's kind of plot here.
The overall structure gives a unity of plot movement, which progresses chronologically from day to day. Likewise unity of place is observed in that all the action occurs in the frontier area around Lake George and the headwaters of the Hudson River in New York State. The unity of time is compact, the total action occurring over a period of days from late July to mid-August in 1757.
