James Fenimore Cooper's The Last Of The Mohicans

Critical Analysis 3
The Last of the Mohicans? More like The Last of my Patience James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans tells the tale of famed American literature hero, Natty Bumppo, dubbed with the moniker “Hawkeye”, and his woodland adventures with his various companions, of both white and “red” skin. Even though this premise seems to promise fun and substantial comedic influence, it is laced with many heart wrenching moments that make the reader question what they just read. Nevertheless, there are still faults in Cooper’s writing that prevent his work from being great, such as inaccurate depictions of Native American life and a sluggish pace, as according to James A. Levernier, PhD., an English professor at the University of

Not many readers would be able to pick up on the faulty likeness of Native Americans because Cooper makes up for it with his unyieldingly violent action scenes. Levernier also concurs that, “the brutality of the Indians undercuts the romantic myth that [lies] in the wilderness of the New World” (Levernier). Unfortunately for Cooper, it takes a lot more than a few brief battle sequences to make up for clichéd personas of a rich

Most of the chapters are too dragged out when they should have end. The plot is so tiresome that whenever briskly unfolded scenes happen, the transition is awkward and the reader misses what Cooper is trying to say because it comes out of nowhere. Cooper’s dialogue and narrative also adds to the tedious measure at which his book progresses. His characters, “make long speeches, preach dull sermons, and ventilate very self-evident propositions with great solemnity of utterance,” according to Hilliard (Hilliard 64). Actually,. His scenes where his characters face serious external and internal conflict come off as too melodramatic and occur way too much in the writing. I only kept reading for Cooper’s better-evolved characters (like Cora), only to be disappointed with their death in the end. They could have been, “capable of offering the possibility for moral renewal through a blending of the virtues of the Old and New Worlds,” but their deaths prompt more argument that Cooper is a racist for killing them off in order to keep things “purely white” (Levernier). The Last of the Mohicans was undisputedly one of the more popular pieces of American literature because of the appeal of an almost otherworldly race coming in contact with the common white man. Despite the fact that Cooper was an average writer at best, his