His use of dialogue is another matter. Hawkeye's talk varies awkwardly from the literary to the vernacular, though his subject of discussion sometimes accounts for the verbal difference. Conversation of other characters is often stilted or too formal under the circumstances. In the case of the Indians, Cooper was attempting to imitate their figurative oratory in formal situations as he understood that declamation to be. Perhaps the kindest we can be to him is to say that he apparently lacked an ear for the rhythms of human speech in ordinary situations.
Finally there is the consideration of symbolism. Aside from the mythic symbolism of the scout, Cooper does not do a great deal with symbols. Caves serve a vital function for plot and setting, but they never conjure up the image, say, of Plato's cave or of the classic myth of the Labyrinth, and it would doubtless be stretching matters too far to find Freudian meaning in them. Some critics have felt that Hawkeye's description of the water falls constitutes a symbol for the occasional chaotic tumults along the river of life and thus represents the period of human conflict and chaos in the novel. Such is an ingenious and very tempting reading of the passage, and it does no violence to the import of the novel as a whole; but if Cooper consciously or unconsciously meant it to be a symbol for the novel, one might expect him to revert to the same or a parallel image now and then, especially near the end of the story. When he wants a reader to be aware of symbolic possibilities, he is generally as straightforward as with his exposition and description. When at mid-novel the five protagonists return to the scene of the massacre, for instance, Cooper says that the landscape, which had appeared different before, now looked "like some pictured allegory of life, in which objects were arrayed in their harshest but truest colors, and without the relief of any shadowing." We may say that, with the great exception of the mythic Hawkeye, Cooper's use of symbolism is rather haphazard and inadequately developed.
Cooper's major failing is probably in his style. It can be wordy, heavy, and awkward. But it does have the virtues of simplicity and clarity, both of which are appropriate for his plot, setting, and characters, and both of which make bas-relief of the frontier chaos, ugly and carbuncular against the healthy life of nature, nature's influence, and nature's Hawkeye.
