The Last of the Mohicans

Cooper's treatment of his theme is not all negative. The solution to these differences is to accept them and thereby rise above them. This answer is an ideal one, at best only seldom realized; and that is why Hawkeye, in his role as a messiah figure, is a mythic hero. What he embodies is great and potentially generic, but so far it has usually been beyond the full realization of people. It is the ideal of universality, of loving acceptance of others with their individual "gifts." In treating this concept, which of course extends further than any frontier condition but is inherent to it, Cooper does not let his idea of "place" limit him to mere description and action. Instead, he unobtrusively but clearly points to nature as the most influential force in making Hawkeye what he is. The scout has little regard for organized religion and its books. In fact, he says he has never read but one book, the book of nature, "and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling, though I may boast that of forty long and hard-working years." His eagerness to talk about religion and the hereafter even at highly inopportune times indicates his interest in the matter, but he is what he is and believes what he does because for forty years he has been instructed by nature. Part of the answer, then, is simplicity and fundamentalism, both of which are implicit, for example, in the recurring father-child motif. Hawkeye does not find his needs answered in the usual love between the sexes, but in a vicarious father-child relationship with Uncas. Like the story's real fathers (including the father of the cowardly young Huron), he accepts responsibility toward the other with his differences in a way that is redolent of his brotherhood with Chingachgook. The splendid isolation that is his stems from his charitable and humane individualism, which paradoxically binds him closer than usual to others. Because this is a pure ideal, investing a fictional human being with it makes that person a myth. It is nonetheless worthy of mortal pursuit, and Cooper's presentation of it in The Last of the Mohicans, while by contrast it deepens the sense of tragic failings, functions like a thematic image of hope.