The book begins innocently enough, with an introduction that tells us that the setting is the third year of the French and Indian War. The author’s use of historical facts allows the reader to more vividly imagine what is being described, and allows Cooper to draw on the reader’s knowledge of the French and Indian War. Already, the specter of racism has “reared its ugly head”, as one of the characters of the book exhibits a stereotypical reaction to a Native American, one of both fascination and repulsion. This fear of Native Americans is what fueled, in part, the Jackson-era anti-Native American policies

The Last of the Mohicans is an interesting, exciting, if not over-dramatized, read. That does not mean, however, that any credence can be given to Cooper’s grossly inaccurate descriptions of Native Americans and frontier life. For this reason, the book is not deserving of its genre classification, “Historical Fiction”. However, it is important to note Cooper’s undeniable contribution to American folklore and frontier romance.

An interesting tidbit that one can pick up from the book is a description of the lost art of psalmody. Embodied in one character in the book, Gamut, this antiquated practice of putting biblical verses to song “on the go” is akin to the minstrels of medieval times. The biblical motifs in The Last of the Mohicans can seem overwhelming at times, and often evokes a sort of “good vs. evil” feeling. Unfortunately, to fall back on stereotypes, Cooper often depicts the “Injuns” as evil. Scholars have suggested that Cooper has an implicit linguistic philosophy embedded in The Last of the Mohicans. The most well reputed Cooper scholar belongs to a school of thought that fits language of the book into the model set by biblical narratives. He argues that Cooper uses two “linguistic paradigms”: Eden and Babel. In terms of the first paradigm, Cooper is said to set up the Delaware as the untapped ethereal language of Eden, the "pure, unfallen language that would embody the new American reality". English and French act as Cooper’s “fallen languages”. These ideas coincide with other interpretations of the novel that had already adopted these same biblical motifs to explain its battles between good and evil, its ideas of Indian descent to hell, and its Miltonic flavor. Cooper also believed that the way Native Americans named things was closer, spiritually, to these places. He thinks of Native American words as fused with the places they name, and links Native American's loss of land to loss of language. Dennis Allen states, "Initially confined to a language of signs and physical objects having natural relations to the ideas expressed," they conjectured, "man developed a highly figurative speech which gradually gave way to conventional abstract lan

Some topics in this essay:
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