Hawkeye and the Mohicans: An Archetypal Analysis

A Deep Dive into The Last of the Mohicans, Part 2

Ideological Constructs, Not Characters

Before a story can advance themes, it must have characters. Yet the central figures of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans—the frontiersman Hawkeye and his Mohican companions, Chingachgook and Uncas—are not characters in the modern, psychological sense. This article argues that they are best understood as ideological archetypes: symbolic figures engineered to explore and resolve the central contradictions of a young American nation struggling to define itself against the wilderness and its Indigenous inhabitants. Hawkeye embodies a fantasy of cultural mediation and pure, natural virtue, while Chingachgook and Uncas personify the “noble savage,” a romantic figure whose tragic dignity masks a narrative of colonial justification.

Hawkeye: The Man Between Worlds

Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, is arguably the first great American literary hero, a man whose primary function is to exist in a state of productive tension. Of white birth but raised among the Delaware, he is positioned as a mediator between “civilization” and the “wilderness.” He possesses, in theory, the best of both worlds: the moral compass of his Christian heritage and the ecological competence of his Indigenous teachers. As Richard Slotkin argues in his foundational study of the frontier myth, Hawkeye is the quintessential “man who knows Indians,” whose legitimacy as a hero comes from his ability to adopt Indigenous skills to defend the advance of white civilization (Slotkin 94).

Cooper continually emphasizes Hawkeye’s liminal status. “I am a man without a cross,” he famously declares, asserting his racial purity even as his cultural identity is entirely hybrid (Cooper 61). He is a living paradox: a master of the forest who enables its conquest, a critic of civilization’s wastefulness who protects its agents. This contradictory nature makes him a potent symbol of the American individualist—a figure who stands apart from society to critique it, yet ultimately serves its expansionist goals.

Chingachgook and Uncas: The “Noble Savages”

If Hawkeye represents a new, hybrid American identity, Chingachgook and Uncas represent an old world whose disappearance the novel frames as both tragic and inevitable. They are perfect embodiments of the “noble savage” trope, a Romantic concept that portrays Indigenous people as innately good and dignified, uncorrupted by civilization but ultimately doomed by its advance.

• Chingachgook: The father, the “Great Serpent,” is the wise, stoic elder. He represents the past and serves as a figure of profound loss, a living link to a time before colonial domination.
• Uncas: The son, the titular “last of the Mohicans,” is the archetype of the young, noble warrior. Cooper describes him in idealized, almost ethereal terms, focusing on his “agile” form and “princely” bearing.

The intense, homoerotic friendship between Hawkeye and Chingachgook, which Leslie Fiedler identified as a foundational myth of American literature, represents an escape from the complexities of society into a racially innocent, all-male Eden (Fiedler 209). Yet, this idealized bond serves a darker ideological purpose. By presenting the Mohicans as superlatively noble and yet tragically fated to disappear, the novel transforms an act of historical displacement into a beautiful, natural tragedy. Uncas’s death is not just a personal loss but a symbolic one, clearing the stage for the nation that Hawkeye represents.

These characters are mythic figures, designed not for realism but to perform a specific cultural work: to create a national hero in Hawkeye and to elegize the continent’s Indigenous peoples in a way that makes their removal seem like a matter of fate, rather than policy.

Discussion Questions

1. To what extent do characters like Hawkeye and Chingachgook function more as archetypes than as psychologically realistic individuals? Where does Cooper prioritize symbolic representation over believable human behaviour?
2. While Hawkeye is often considered the novel’s protagonist, how do Chingachgook and Uncas challenge this reading? Discuss the novel’s shifting heroic focus.
3. Analyze the role of the homoerotic bond between Hawkeye and Chingachgook, as identified by Leslie Fiedler. How does this relationship function as both an escape from and a justification for the societal changes happening around them?
4. Compare and contrast the characters of Uncas and his foil, the Huron warrior Magua. How does Cooper use this opposition to construct a moral binary between “good” and “bad” savagery?

Continue to the next part: A Savage Eden: Thematic Exploration of the Frontier

Return to the A Deep Dive into The Last of the Mohicans Series index

This article was developed through an iterative collaboration between our Editor-in-Chief and multiple AI language models. Various LLMs contributed at different stages—from initial ideation and drafting to refinement and technical review. Each AI served as a creative and analytical partner, while human editors maintained final oversight, ensuring accuracy, quality, and alignment with AuthZ's editorial standards.