Essay Questions

The Deerslayer is the last of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales to be published, but the first chronologically. What is the effect of this time warp?

The most notable effect is that this is by far the most contemplative and least action-filled entry in the series. The sense is that Cooper was fueled by the familiarity of his characters among the reading public to the point that he felt confident enough to write a character-driven story rather without the commercial imperative of pleasing the crowd. Instead of the breakneck pace adhering to a plot that needed to be followed to its climax, readers are invited to get to know even more intimately these characters that were already legendary through scenes of conversation and reflections on nature and man’s place in the wilderness.

How is the overall tone and mood of this novel different from the others in the Leatherstocking Tales series?

The most entry in the series, The Last of the Mohicans, is permeated with a spiritual sense of the exceptionalism of American democracy. The Prairie, interestingly, seems to invert this order with an overarching commentary on the legal aspects of morality. Of all the books in the Tales, The Pioneers seems the most optimistic with sense of hope for the future of America that does not seem urgent at all, but confident enough to withstand setbacks. The Deerslayer, perhaps because the author viewed it as the definitive last book in the series, is distinguished by a sense of peaceful serenity occasioned by the realization that the history of American will be written from a future that looks back upon the past as making mistakes, sure, but overall having proven itself as doing the right thing.

Mark Twain infamously wrote that The Deerslayer was a case of literary delirium tremens in which the author violated nearly every single rule of the art of writing. Is he right?

No. Plainly and simply, the venom that Twain spewed toward Cooper’s talents on more than one occasion has proven to be a black mark not on the career of the writer the creator of the Leatherstocking Tales, but on Twain himself. Mark Twain needs no defense in the argument that he was a master of the bitterly corrosive satirical jab, but the overwhelming number of cases in which he launched a full force attack he was absolutely or at least mostly in the right. (Such as his contrarian opinion of the greatness of Teddy Roosevelt.) On the subject of Cooper in particular and The Deerslayer in general, however, one can only assume that even a mind as great as Twain’s was subject to a bug in the system. Among the offenses Twain clearly delineates on the part of the novel: it goes nowhere, features uninteresting characters, conversation does replicate actual human talk and that its plot is dependent upon impossible miracles.

The Deerslayer can be effectively be said to go somewhere quite impressive: it leads to four sequels. Natty Bumppo, the hero of the series, is already well-known by the time this novel was published yet Cooper still manages to make the younger version of the iconic figure surprising while not corrupting his personality. As for Cooper’s talent for writing conversation, those passages are what makes this book stand out from all the others and, for a certain type of reader, such leisurely discourse is likely to make it their favorite all the Tales.