Narrative Structure and Historical Process in The Last of the Mohicans

T[HE LAST OF THE MOHICANS is commonly thought most exciting of Leatherstocking tales; a number of critics also consider it least significant of them. Yvor Winters, one, declared it the best single plot of adventure in but added that it nowhere rises to a level of seriousness.1 James Grossman characterized it as pure adventure story, deliberately superficial and set in arbitrarily simplified world where everything happens sake of excitement of action.2 Their opinions are representative; they are also perfectly understandable. Supposedly, serious historical fiction must, like epic, deal with events of great importance to race or nation. From an American standpoint, action in Cooper's novel instead appears almost perversely insignificant. Despite its precise subtitle-a narrative of I757-and its use of specific geographical settings, actual characters and events, in terms of historical consequence The Last of Mohicans seems to float free of real place and time. Characteristic-perhaps symbolic-of all is fall of Fort William Henry, most significant actual event in novel. It is a French victory in a war won by English, a war waged, according to Cooper, for possession of a country that neither was destined to retain.3 A like air of futility surrounds most action in Cooper's tale. Characters take what turn out to be fruitless precautions; they lay out and follow what prove to be foolish plans. They put faith in empty authorities, practice useless skills. Nearly all of them end novel dead or isolated in wilderness. Indeed, at first glance, common denominator of all those situations Cooper gathered together into his book seems to be

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• Beyond the Last Mohican

  Dennis Duffy•The American Review of Canadian…•1992

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