Word: chingachgook
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...what Adam might have been . . . before the fall," as Cooper puts it. In five fat books Natty swerves from his nature once, by falling in love, but a younger and lesser man gets the girl. Down those mean forest paths Natty must walk alone, except for his Indian comrade, Chingachgook...
...point, he is a relativist. Good white men go to heaven when they die, while good Indians head for the happy hunting ground. Natty refuses to send either on their way minus scalps, because it goes against the grain of his "gifts," though he thinks it proper for Chingachgook to do so. But he recognizes a moral bottom line below which there is only one standard and one eternal judge. It is never proper to kill a man who is not trying to kill you, whatever you do with his hair afterward. Beyond human laws is natural...
...story, in brief, is this: Natty Bumppo and his two Mohican companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, help an English officer, Duncan, escort two young maidens through the wilderness during the French and Indian War. In the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, romance blossoms between the officer and the younger woman, and between Uncas and the elder. To avoid shocking his readers with miscegenation, Cooper gave the elder just the tiniest trace of Black blood. This racist attitude so shocked our modern screenwriters that they decided to make make Natty the romantic lead instead of Uncas. So the central romance...
...while the author's attachment to misfits and backwaters never goes out of style. Neither does his premise: two aging gunfighters give it one more shot. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are descended from the noble buddy system of American literature. Exotically paired males, like Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim, fling themselves at the wilderness and sooner or later paddle into the mainstream. McCrae and Call join the mythic flow by stealing a herd of Mexican cattle and driving them from Texas to Montana. Why leave semiretirement and undertake a journey better suited for younger...
...Fiedler has boldly led his readers down whirlpools of the national subconscious. In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), he argued that the country's literature was obsessed with death and therefore incapable of developing mature heterosexual themes. Such matey relationships as Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg and Huck Finn and Jim, said Fiedler, were bonded by an innocent and idealized homosexual sentiment. He never said these heroes were homosexuals, though he did use "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" as the titillating title of his essay...