The Last of the Mohicans: Foreshadowing 3 key examples

The "snapping of a dried stick" and the "rustling of leaves" are sounds with which Cooper's readers are almost certainly familiar. They can mean nothing, but they can also signal the presence of someone or something nearby. Duncan is on edge because earlier in the day, Hawkeye and the Mohicans warned him that Magua was not to be trusted. Charged with bringing Alice and Cora to Fort William Henry under Magua's guidance, Duncan does not have much choice in the matter of trusting him. After all, he does not know his way through the woods, especially a way that avoids enemy combatants. Duncan is also a young soldier who trusts his commanders without question, and he has been told that Magua's loyalties lie with the English. Readers who have ever felt spooked by their own suspicions or by their environment will understand the experience of hearing a creepy sound and trying to rationalize it away.

Whereas readers may want Duncan to believe his ears and start looking around for a trap, the sounds in the forest in fact foreshadow a friendly presence. There is indeed a trap lying in wait, but the trap turns out to be for Magua. Chingachgook springs up from the bushes, Hawkeye shoots his gun, and Uncas follows soon after. Magua manages to escape, and he becomes the main antagonist of the novel. But by providing Duncan with surprise backup, Hawkeye and the Mohicans furnish Duncan's escape from the crafty "Renard Subtil." The fact that the noises turn out to foreshadow a friendly presence rather than a sinister one sets the tone for the rest of the novel: the forest is full of hidden surprises, and it is impossible to know if they will be good or bad until they reveal themselves.

This quotation is from Act 1, Scene 2, of Shakespeare's play. In this scene, several working-class people (including Snug and Quince) meet to plan a play they will perform at Theseus and Hippolyta's royal wedding. This exchange is supposed to be comical: Snug asks Quince for the lion's lines so that he can practice them well in advance of the performance, and Quince says he can just improvise because all the lion does is roar.

At this point in The Last of the Mohicans, Duncan is pretending to be a doctor and has been brought to the sickbed of a woman with powerful connections among the Hurons. To his surprise, David Gamut is also there. An oddly-behaving bear has followed Duncan through the cavernous route he took to reach this woman. So far, he has assumed that the bear has been domesticated by the Hurons, but he is thrown off when the bear starts intoning along with David Gamut—who is, as per usual, singing a hymn. What Duncan does not know (and what the reader too will find out in this chapter) is that the bear is no bear at all. Rather, Hawkeye has dressed up in a bear costume to come rescue Duncan and David.

The Shakespearean epigraph hints that the bear is really a man dressed up in a wild animal costume, doing his best to improvise life-like roars. Even outside the scene directly referenced in the epigraph, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play filled with mischief and deception. Cooper is hinting to readers that he is playing with comedy and allowing his characters to have a bit of fun with each other. Although it is possible to understand the book while ignoring the chapter epigraphs, looking closely at them often reveals something about what is on the horizon for the characters. For instance, the following chapter opens with another quotation from A Midsummer Night's Dream. This time, it is another character (Bottom) asking if he, too, can play the part of the lion. Lo and behold, Hawkeye ends up giving the bear costume to Uncas later in that chapter.

The moss-covered piles of dead wood remind Hawkeye of "the memorials of a former and long-departed generation." The trees all seem to be bound for the same fate: every one of them will eventually shed its leaves for the last time, losing their "principle of life." They will "groan and totter" until their dead trunks can no longer support their own weight. Then, they will fall to the ground and decay into the earth, just like the dead bodies of a generation of people that has passed out of existence.

By likening the piles of dead wood to a human graveyard, Cooper foreshadows the funeral and burial that will take place in the final chapter. Cora and Uncas both die in battle and are buried near each other in Lenape fashion, as if they are married. Cooper describes Uncas's burial as especially significant because he is the "last of the Mohicans." Although Chingachgook still lives, his only son has died without producing an heir. The Mohicans thus become "a former and [...] departed generation." The fact that Cora is buried alongside Uncas instead of in an English settlement adds additional significance to this "departure." Uncas and Cora are never married when they are alive, and they never have children. Had they done so, not only would they have carried on the Mohican line, but they also would have given birth to a new, multi-ethnic generation with American Indian, English, and Creole ancestry. Unlike Hawkeye, who is a white "man without a cross" (referring to religion but also race), Cora and Uncas's descendants would have been people with a cross. With these would-be ancestors, the dream of a multi-ethnic American people dies. Their joint graves, near each other and yet not shared, become the memorial of a future than never came to be. Cooper depicts their burial as the moment when racial stratification becomes a permanent part of American life.

It is important to note that this melancholy ending is highly romanticized. By imagining that not only the Mohicans but also a multi-ethnic American people are dead and buried, Cooper invites readers to mourn a more just world. But he also closes the door to that more just world, leaving readers with the sense that white people are destined to rule the continent with a guilty conscience.