The Last of the Mohicans

Only Hawkeye, of all the whites, is competent to survive, mainly because his experience in the woods has instilled in him the humility he needs to understand the Indian and to interpret the white and red man to each other (Ringe 26).

The message of the book with respect to survival is not that an individual must be willing and able to overpower the natural or human forces which line up against him and threaten his existence. To the contrary, for Hawkeye the key to survival physically, psychologically and spiritually is finding his place in relationship to his environment---not overpowering that environment with power and arrogance.

There is no doubt that the author is critical of the more "cold and selfish" objectives of many of the white men who came to conquer the land and the native peoples of America. Even those conquerors, however, in order to survive, much less accomplish their greedy goals, had to adopt a more humble attitude toward the rugged environment: "Emulating the patience and self-denial of the practised native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty" (Cooper 1).

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ult, he will not be able to learn from that enemy---the wilderness or the Indian, for example---precisely what he needs to survive. His arrogance and ignorance, in effect, will be the death of him, whereas humility would have perhaps saved him. This does not mean that the individual survivor must necessarily be a saint, for Hawkeye was certainly not a saint. Ringe writes accurately that Hawkeye was "superstitious, ignorant and prejudiced," but he was nevertheless capable of the saving trait of humility: He perceives as no other white character does his true relation to the immensity of the nature that surrounds him; and his humility lets him see good even in his enemies. He alone sees virtue and justice among the Indians as well as among those of his own color . . . and he doesn't make the mistake of completely scorning the heathen. He is willing to learn from them, and his knowledge wins him survival (Ringe 27). The majority of the other whites brought with them to the world of the wilderness the European attitude of the conqueror. They sought not to learn from nature or from the native residents, but rather "complete mastery of the continent" (Ringe 26-27). Of course, humility is not the only quality required for long-ter
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Approximate Word count = 2157
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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