“ The Last of the Mohicans” is set in the 1757, while the French and Indian war was happening. It uses recognizable American tradition by forming a model created in the image of the initial voyagers. Cooper’s frontiersman, Hawk-eye, expresses the model American romantic hero.
He is a rebel who discards civilization, embraces the environment, cohabits with Native Americans. Hawk-eye assists as a leader into the American land for both the European characters in the story and the reader. Cooper novel offers more than a Eurocentric viewpoint by offering a voice to the Native American characters. He generates a discussion among both sides and demonstrates that a passive coexistence can be achieved. It is in hindsight that Cooper is proficient in creating characters. In a touching dialogue, Hawk-eye and his confidant, Chingachgook, the last of the Mohican tribe, converses the origin of the battle between their two races.
“ Your fathers came from the setting sun, crossed the big river, fought the people of the country, and took the land; and mine came from the red sky of the morning, over the salt lake, and did their work much after the fashion that had been set them by yours; then let God judge the matter between us, and friends spare their words!” “ My fathers fought with the naked red man!” returned the Indian, sternly, in the same language. “ Is there no difference, Hawk-eye, between the stone-headed arrow of the warrior, and the leaden bullet with which you kill?” (Cooper 30)
When Cooper published his novel, the United States was plunged in the conflict generated by colonization. As America prolonged to enlarge to the west, imprisonment and direct encounter with Native America continued to be an important issue. At the center of “ The Last of the Mohicans” is the imprisonment and loss theme. In the novel, Hawk-eye and his two Indian confidants, Chingachgook and Uncas, lead a soldier, psalmist and the other fellow heroines, Cora and Alice, across the wasteland through a war involving the English, French and Indians while being chased by the Indian opponent, Magua. At the culmination of the novel, following two rounds of hunt, imprisonment and liberation, Uncas, Cora and Magua end up deceased.
Cooper is proficient to discover history and the hereditary experiences of Columbus, Smith and Rowlandson which are imbedded in the American mindfulness allowin him to generate an American classic. The time of romance in American literature uses America’s exclusivity with the American wilderness as its scenery and its history as the background. “ The Last of the Mohicans,” searches protuberant images in the American mindfulness – imprisonment and Indian attacks, the disappearing “ noble savage” and the trailblazer as a romantic idol who travels the enormous and stunning yet unforgiving land of the American frontier. The Romantic Movement was favorable to the expression of the truth confronted in the everyday lives of nineteenth century Americans. It is through the investigation of the autobiographical stories of Columbus, Smith and Rowlandson that we are able to comprehend these views of Romanticism as they congregate in Cooper’s historical fiction, “ The Last of the Mohicans,” as it has arisen as a normative American romance. Cooper’s novel arouses the idea of the beautiful landscape that Columbus discovered, Smith as a passionate hero, Rowlandson as an incarcerated. As established in the literature of Columbus, Smith and Rowlandson, America’s groundwork was bursting with conflict. The novel mirrors Cooper’s inspection of those battles and the subsequent loss for both the colonizers and the Native Americans
