The Last of The Mohicans: Theme Analysis

Theme Analysis
Culture Clash
In the wilderness of upper New York, two cultures clash—white Eurocentric culture and native Indian culture. Ample evidence is given in the novel of the destruction caused to the Indians by the coming of the whites—Hawkeye himself acknowledges that this is so. The reason that Magua was driven from the Hurons, for example, was because the whites introduced the Indians to alcohol, and he fell victim to it. The savagery of the conflict between whites and Indians is apparent in numerous incidents. The two races do not understand each other’s ways, even though they make many alliances with each other according to what they believe is in their best interest.
Generally speaking, Hawkeye, Heyward, and David Gamut, each in his different way, represent the values of white civilization. Heyward represents the military ideal; David represents the sect of Protestantism known as Calvinism. Hawkeye is a more complex case because he in a sense lives in both worlds, Indian and white, and has great respect for some of the Indian ways. Although he thinks Indians other than Delawares and Mohicans are liars and “varlets,” he acknowledges the validity of their religion and respects many of their customs.
However, Hawkeye still sees a wide gulf between the ways of the “Mingo” and those of the white man. He believes that whites have a more enlightened set of values, inspired by Christianity, although he is not an especially religious man. He claims that it is because he is white that he does not kill Magua when in Chapter XXV he has the Huron chief at his mercy. He gives the same reason for not killing the Indian medicine man from whom he steals the bearskin. Revenge, Hawkeye claims, is an Indian practice. However, the reader is left in no doubt that Hawkeye has killed on numerous occasions. He says that there is no quarrel between him and the Mingoes that cannot be settled by a rifle shot.
The author’s perspective, which is heard in the voice of the narrator, is also complex. Cooper abundantly expresses the attitudes commonly held in his time toward Indians. He regularly refers to them as “savages.” Magua is depicted as cunning and crafty, and it is implied that these are common characteristics of Indians. Just as Hawkeye believes that revenge is an Indian pursuit, Cooper’s narrator comments that Magua was “goaded incessantly by those revengeful impulses that in a savage seldom slumber” (Chapter XXVII).
But in many other places, the narrator, like Hawkeye, makes favorable comments about Indian culture. He makes some effort to be objective, to see beyond his own prejudices. Much of this is in connection with the Mohicans, the “good” Indians, but he also acknowledges that even the “savages” have some qualities to be appreciated—in the way he admires the construction of the Huron village in Chapter XXI, for example.
Interracial Relationships
The theme of interracial relationships between Indians and whites is an undercurrent throughout the novel. Such relationships are frowned upon and regarded as unnatural. Magua’s desire for Cora, for example, is considered by all as repugnant.
The matter is complicated by the fact that Cora herself has dark blood in her, since her mother was descended from slaves.
Although Cora vehemently rejects Magua’s approaches, the first time she sees him, her reaction is mixed. She looks at him with “pity, admiration and horror, as her dark eye followed the easy motions of the savage.” The description continues by emphasizing the darkness of Cora’s hair, and her complexion, which was “not brown, but it rather appeared charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds” (Chapter I). The suggestion is that it is the dark blood in Cora that attracts Magua, and produces an unacknowledged response in her.
Cora appears to have a more enlightened attitude to matters of race than was common at the time. She remarks of Uncas, for example, that no one looking at him would “remember the shade of his skin” (Chapter VI). But the response of those around her is even more significant: “an embarrassed silence succeeded this remark.” It is clear that the color of a man’s skin is of great significance indeed in the eyes of everyone but Cora.
Uncas’s love for Cora falls into the same category of interracial relationships. The author avoids having to deal with the consequences of it by killing off both characters, although he permits the Delaware women to believe that Cora and Uncas are together after death. Hawkeye, not surprisingly, scoffs at this idea.
The theme of the undesirability of interracial relationships does not, however, extend to friendship between men. The friendship and loyalty between Hawkeye, Chingachgook and Uncas forms a consistent theme throughout the novel. The touching scene at the end, in which Hawkeye reaches out to comfort Chingachgook in his bereavement, and swear his continued friendship, suggests the possibility of intercultural understanding and cooperation. The tragic irony is that Chingachgook and Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, symbolically represent the last of a dying Indian culture, including not only the Mohicans but all the Indian tribes—dispersed, divided and ultimately destroyed by the coming of the Europeans.
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The Last of The Mohicans: Character Profiles

Character Profiles
Chingachgook: Chingachgook is the last of the great Mohican chiefs. His name means “Big Serpent,” or “Great Snake,” which according to Hawkeye means that he understands the “windings and turnings” of human nature. Chingachgook is a reliable ally and friend of Hawkeye, capable in battle, stern, and always remaining dignified and calm, even in the most dangerous situations. He takes part in the final battle with the Hurons, only to see his son Uncas killed by Magua.
David Gamut: David Gamut is the tall, ungainly, pious singing teacher from Connecticut who accompanies Hawkeye’s party. David is a Calvinist who believes in the doctrine of predestination—the notion that who is to be saved and who damned has already been decreed by God. David teaches sacred music to youths, but Hawkeye has no time for his songs and thinks he should have a real profession. David is not a fighting man but he survives the Huron attacks because he has a habit of singing in situations of danger. The Hurons therefore regard him as insane, and do not harm him. David does exhibit some noble qualities. He is prepared to risk danger by taking the place of the captured Uncas in the Indian lodge, and in the final battle he expresses his wish to do his part, using his sling.
Hawkeye: Hawkeye’s full name is Natty Bumppo, although he is never called by that name in this novel. His friends call him Hawkeye. Hawkeye is a strongly built white hunter and scout with a fearsome reputation amongst his Indian enemies, who call him “La Longue Carabine,” which is French for “the long rifle.” Hawkeye is an experienced, independent, astute man, who knows the wilderness like the back of his hand. He is endlessly resourceful, leaving Cora and Alice to get help when that was the only way to proceed, and then returning and successfully ambushing the Hurons. It is Hawkeye’s cunning plan to disguise himself in an Indian medicine man’s bearskin that leads to the freeing of Alice from the Huron village.
Hawkeye is honest but can be guileful when the situation demands it. He sometimes expresses a pantheistic philosophy that shows his love of nature, and this is contrasted with the religious piety of David Gamut. Hawkeye is a also a veteran fighter who has taken part in many battles with the French and the Indians. Although he has a generally low opinion of Indians, Hurons especially, he likes Mohicans and Delawares, whom he regards as more honest. He has a deep, long-standing friendship with the two Mohicans, and is ready to risk his life to save Uncas. At the end of the novel, when Chingachgook laments that he is now left alone, Hawkeye pledges to stick with him in friendship.
Major Duncan Heyward: Major Duncan Heyward is the young officer who is charged with protecting Cora and Alice Munro on their trip from to Fort Edward from Fort William Henry. He is an honorable man who at first is unwilling to believe that Magua has deliberately deceived them about the path to the fort. Heyward is an able soldier, brave and resourceful, although he sometimes needs Uncas or Hawkeye to come to his rescue and save his life. He falls in love with Alice. When Alice is captured, he shows his devotion to her by disguising himself as a medicine man and rescuing her from the Hurons. Heyward gains Colonel Munro’s permission to marry Alice. They are the only characters in the novel whose story ends happily.
Magua: Magua is the Huron chief and the main enemy of Hawkeye and his party. He is fierce and cunning and is known as “Le Renard Subtil.” He is also known as a masterful, charismatic orator who can win the attention and sympathy of an audience. Magua has a complex history. He was born a Huron chief and a warrior, but when he was twenty years old he took to drink (provided by the whites) and the Hurons expelled him from their tribe. He was then adopted by the Mohawks, and became an ally of the English. But when Colonel Munro found that he had been drinking, Magua was given a public whipping. At the beginning of the novel, Magua is employed as a “runner,” responsible for guiding the party of Heyward and the two young women on a path to Fort Edward. But he leads them into a trap instead. After his treachery is exposed, he escapes, and is then involved in a deadly struggle with his enemies. In order to gain revenge on Munro for having him whipped, he kidnaps Cora and tries to make her his wife. Often Magua seems close to triumph, especially when the Delawares give him permission to depart with Cora. But Magua is finally killed by a rifle shot from Hawkeye.
The Marquis de Montcalm: The Marquis de Montcalm is the French commander who conducts the siege of Fort William Henry. He gives the English very generous terms that allow them to retain their dignity. Montcalm is a man of honor and refinement, although the author implies that he did nothing to stop the massacre that took place after the English surrender.
Colonel Munro: Colonel Munro is the commander of the English Fort William Henry, and is the father of Cora and Alice. He is devastated by the necessary surrender of the fort to the French, and deeply distressed by the capture of his daughters and the subsequent murder of Cora.
Alice Munro: Alice Munro is the younger daughter of Colonel Munro. She is fair-skinned, with golden hair and blue eyes. She is presented as being weak and emotional, although on occasions she does show some courage, as when she prefers to die rather than win her freedom by allowing Cora be taken as wife by Magua. Alice is courted by Heyward and her father gives them permission to marry.
Cora Munro: Cora Munro is the daughter of Colonel Munro, and the elder sister, by four or five years, of Alice. She is the opposite of Alice. She has dark eyes and dark hair, having been descended remotely from a black ancestor. Cora is independent and shows great courage when faced with danger, often comforting her weaker sister. When David, Heyward and her sister Alice are captured by the Hurons, Cora is the only one who has the presence of mind to remember to leave a trail. She also defies Magua and resists his demands. Cora is at the heart of the love triangle between Uncas, who loves her and whom she admires, and Magua, who wants her as his wife, but whom she despises. Cora is eventually killed by a Huron warrior.
Tamenund: Tamenund is the patriarch of the Delawares. He is extremely old, perhaps a hundred years, and is revered by all the tribe.
Uncas: Uncas, who is known to his enemies as “Le Cerf Agile” (the bounding elk), is the son of the Mohican chief Chingachgook. Uncas is young and he is blessed with beauty, strength, nobility and dignity. He says little, and is content to led his actions speak for themselves. His role early in the novel is to protect Cora and Alice on their expedition. He graciously attends to their needs, and they have confidence in him. Uncas has particular affection for Cora; he also shows great loyalty to Hawkeye. Uncas is an expert hunter and tracker, and even Hawkeye acknowledges his superior skill. He is vital in the party’s efforts to track the path taken by Magua and Cora. He is also a courageous warrior, once saving Heyward’s life in a fight with an Indian. When he is captured by the Hurons, Uncas exhibits only defiance, not fear. He is eventually honored by the Delawares as their chief, since as a Mohican he is descended from the ancestors of the Delawares. In the final battle with the Hurons he is killed by Magua.
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Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Interracial Love and Friendship
The Last of the Mohicans is a novel about race and the difficulty of overcoming racial divides. Cooper suggests that interracial mingling is both desirable and dangerous. Cooper lauds the genuine and longtime friendship between Hawkeye, a white man, and Chingachgook, a Mohican Indian. Hawkeye and Chingachgook’s shared communion with nature transcends race, enabling them to team up against Huron enemies and to save white military leaders like Heyward. On the other hand, though, Cooper shows his conviction that interracial romances are doomed and undesirable. The interracial love of Uncas and Cora ends in tragedy, and the forced interracial relationship between Cora and Magua is portrayed as unnatural. Through Cora, Cooper suggests that interracial desire can be inherited; Cora desires Indian men because her mother was part black.
Literal and Metaphorical Nature Nature functions both literally and metaphorically in The Last of the Mohicans. In its literal form, nature is the physical frontier that surrounds the characters and complicates their battles and their chances for survival. In the opening paragraphs of Chapter I, Cooper describes the unpredictability of the colonial terrain, pointing out that the cleared, flat battlefields of Europe are no longer the setting for war. The New World has a new set of natural difficulties, and the men at war must contend not just with each other but with the unfriendly land. The forbidding landscape seems even more daunting to the English because their adversaries, the Indians loyal to France, know the land so well. The skills of the English have no place in the forests of America. David Gamut’s religious Calvinism, a European religion, becomes ridiculous in the wilderness.
Metaphorically, the land serves as a blank canvas on which the characters paint themselves. Cooper defines characters by their relationships to nature. Hawkeye establishes his claim to heroism by respecting the landscape. The English Major Heyward establishes his incompetence by misunderstanding the landscape. While he means well, his unfamiliarity with the wilderness thwarts him. Magua uses the landscape to carry out his villainy, hiding women in caves, jumping wildly over abysses, and hiding behind rocks.
The Role of Religion in the Wilderness
The character David Gamut allows Cooper to explore the relevance of religion in the wilderness. In theory at least, the American frontier is untouched by human culture. It is a fresh start, a piece of land not ruled by the conventions of European high culture, a place without a firm government or social code. Gamut’s aggressive Calvinism symbolizes the entrance of religion, a European model that enters the blank slate of the New World. We know Gamut is a Calvinist because he talks about predestination, the idea that God has a plan for each person and no amount of human effort can change that plan. Hawkeye’s frequent mockery of Gamut’s psalmody provides the novel’s comic relief. The mockery, which comes from the mouth of the hero, also suggests that institutional religion should not attempt to penetrate the wilderness and convert its inhabitants. Because Cooper makes Gamut ridiculous and Hawkeye heroic, it seems that, like Hawkeye, Cooper scoffs at Calvinism’s tenets.
Gamut’s fatalism contrasts with Hawkeye’s pragmatism. Hawkeye adapts to his surroundings and helps the other characters to achieve improbable survivals, all of which suggests that Cooper believes humans do have the ability to determine their own fates. By the end of the novel the Calvinist Gamut learns to move beyond the rigidity of his religion and become a helpful and committed ally. He succeeds when he finds the ability to leave behind his fatalistic passivity and adapt to the demands of the forest. Cooper’s exploration of Calvinism sets the stage for many American writers of subsequent generations. For example, Herman Melville’s tragic hero Ahab subscribes to the rigid belief in fate that Calvinism endorses.
The Changing Idea of Family
Cooper uses the frontier setting to explore the changing status of the family unit. Cooper posits that the wilderness demands new definitions of family. Uncas and Hawkeye, for example, form a makeshift family structure. When Uncas’s real father, Chingachgook, disappears without explanation in the middle portion of the novel, Hawkeye becomes a symbolic father for Uncas. As Uncas develops his leadership qualities and emerges as a hero at the Delaware council of Tamenund, he takes on some of the charisma and skill of Hawkeye, just as a son would inherit behavior from his father. Not only do Uncas and Hawkeye form a family not related by blood, they form a family that transcends race. Despite this redefinition, however, the novel does not allow new family formations that mix race, for Uncas and Cora do not get to act on their interracial attraction. The tragedy of this sentimental novel is that Cora and Uncas cannot redefine the notion of family according to their desires.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Hybridity
The concept of hybridity is central to the novel’s thematic explorations of race and family. Hybridity is the mixing of separate elements into one whole, and in the novel it usually occurs when nature and culture intersect, or when two races intersect. For example, Cora is a hybrid because her mother was black and her father white. Hawkeye is a hybrid because he is white by blood and Indian by habit. Part of Hawkeye’s success comes from his ability to combine elements of the European and Indian worlds. With Hawkeye, Cooper challenges the idea that essential differences separate the two cultures. Cooper’s depictions of hybridity predate the nineteenth century’s extensive debate on the term’s cultural and scientific meanings. The term “hybridity” became popular at the end of the nineteenth century, when rapid developments in genetics occurred.
Disguise
Cooper uses the motif of disguise to resolve plot difficulties and to provide comic relief. The fantastical nature of the disguises also detracts from the believability of Cooper’s story. Indians who have known the land their whole life, for example, mistake a man disguised in a beaver costume as an actual beaver. These unrealistically convincing costumes are part of Cooper’s move away from realism. Disguise is characteristic of the romantic genre, which favors excesses of imagination over the confinements of reason. The Last of the Mohicans wants to be simultaneously a historically specific narrative, an adventure novel, and a romance. Cooper plays with the comic possibilities of romance, especially by exaggerating human appearances. Disguise therefore proves not only a practical solution to plot dilemmas but an indication that Cooper intends to make his novel partly an amusing romance.
Inheritance
Inheritance informs the novel’s thematic portrayals of family redefinition. The idea of inheritance frequently recurs in the father-son relationship of Hawkeye and Uncas. When Chingachgook disappears in the middle of the novel, Hawkeye becomes a father figure for Uncas and oversees Uncas’s coming-of-age. Hawkeye gives Uncas a valuable inheritance, teaching him and showing him how to become a man and a leader.
Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Hawkeye
Hawkeye is both a character and a symbol. Cooper uses Hawkeye to symbolize colonial hybridity, the mixing of European and Indian cultures. Hawkeye also symbolizes the myth of the hero woodsman. He demonstrates perfect marksmanship in the shooting contest held by the Delawares, for example. Hawkeye also becomes a symbolic father. Excluded from the novel’s love plots, Hawkeye takes part in a different sort of human relationship by creating a father-son dynamic with Uncas.
“The Last of the Mohicans”
The recurring description of Uncas as “the last of the Mohicans” symbolizes the death of Indian culture at the hands of the encroaching European civilization. The title anticipates the ultimate tragedy of the novel’s plot. Although the title specifically refers to Uncas, it also alludes to a larger historical event: the genocidal removal of the Indians by President Andrew Jackson’s policies of the 1830s. The phrase “the last of the Mohicans” laments the extermination of the ways of life native to America.
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This book was an interesting one. The book’s theme was one of racial divides, and how the Native Americans dealt with, and were dealt with the struggles during the third year of the French American war. The theme was brought about by various literary devices, and especially ones that are often forgotten. Some literary devices used to bring about the theme in this book were imagery, dialogue, and tone.
The first literary device this book offers up is imagery. Imagery can be shown in many ways. The book starts describing the setting, “The alarmed colonists believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west.” The imagery within this sentence really sets up the setting as a place you would not want to be in. An unending forest filled with savage natives that would kill you on sight, showing the theme of the story right there in the beginning pages of the book. Another time this was used was further in the book, where it says “They complied without hesitation, though many a fearful and anxious glance was thrown behind them toward the thickening gloom which now lay like a dark barrier along the margin of the stream.” This bit of imagery is really good because it makes you see a void of darkness, instilling fear into your very heart and soul, and all because of the ever looming presence of the various native tribes. A Third example of this would be when it described “… around him, there was a sullen fierceness mingled with the quiet of the savage that was likely to arrest the attention of much more experienced eyes than those which now scanned him in unconcealed amazement.” This is describing how the English saw the Mohican Indian Runner as, as person with a sullen fierceness, and the quiet of the savage. It shows you how the natives were seen through the eyes of the white folk, which in turn draws out the theme.
The second literary device that I will be showing is dialogue. It is an often overlooked device that is sometimes even overused to nowhere near its full potential. One example of dialogue in this book is “even their own kind seem no more than the beasts of the wood.” ..