Twains bark is as big as his bite.

Twain does seem like quite the crotchety old bastard but I have to agree with him.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

When reflecting rule number four onto The Last of the Mohicans I think the best example of a character displaying no real reason for being there is David Gamut. Besides trying to spread Christianity his character does not really accomplish much. He becomes slightly more useful or manly under the charge of Hawkeye but I think the novel could have done without him. Cooper appears to want to show how the white man would have adjusted to the wilderness with Gamut’s character. If this is so Cooper might be trying to show how the white man is out of place in the wilderness but I don’t even think that is the reason. Cooper still has Hawkeye who has transformed himself into a hybrid man; he looks white and is white but has all of the skills of surviving in the wilderness that is essential to the natives’ livelihood. To me he was just another character I had to figure out in this already confusing novel that could have been left out in order to develop other characters in the novel better which would help the reader feel more connected to the novel. Which leads us into the next rule I found related 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. But in the "Deerslayer" tale, this rule is vacated.

I agree with Twain %100 on this one. Trying to figure out what was happening with all of the characters was very troublesome. I was thinking maybe it was because Cooper had already written two novels using these characters that to understand them completely you would have to read those novels first.  But according to Twain, Cooper did not do this in the previous novels either. He just starts writing as if he was in the middle of a story and expects the reader can piece everything together. As the novel goes on we do not really get to know these characters any better. Maybe it is just the long boring writing style that prevents this but nevertheless Coopers characters did not draw me into this book in any way.

Last of the Mohicans was very painful. Let’s hope the next novel is better.