Yes & No

I'd just like to start off by saying that I do agree with everyone when they say that this book was a general bore and a hard one to get through.  That said, I think it's going a little far to insinuate that this book is absolutely useless and a total piece of crap; it does have at least a little to offer, despite its flaws and downfalls.  When Twain rips into Cooper's Deerslayer, he says, "There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction--some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them," this may be the case, but there are a few rules which are definitely violated when it comes to The Last of the Mohicans. 



11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

This rule, for example, may have been violated in Deerslayer, but it also applies for The Last of the Mohicans.  The best representation of this is Hawkeye.  Although we talked extensively in class about how he doesn't seem to fit the role of "hero" or "protagonist" in this novel, he really isn't defined clearly enough to the point where the reader can anticipate his every response and action.  The way he reacts when he sees his enemy falling from a tree is not something the audience could have accurately predicted, and even what he thinks about after wasting his bullet is not necessarily predictable.  Hawkeye is interesting because he is unpredictable; he may be one of the only points of interest in the novel.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.


Personally, there were a number of characters in this book which did not interest me in any way, shape, or form, and even more characters which, in my opinion, were not cohesive.  For me, the only character I was wholly and truly interested in was Uncas, but his fate at the end of this novel is obvious and evident in the title, which makes me almost less interested in his fate.  Other characters, like David Gamut, seem to have no purpose whatsoever in this novel (other than the obscure event he was introduced for) and make me wonder what Cooper's motives were for characters like this, if indeed he had any at all.


-Riannon S.