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Situational Irony
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel's style is self-referential, and it is characterized by long, descriptive sentences. For example, in Chapter 2, the narrator describes Cora, Alice, and Duncan's first meeting with David Gamut:
In a few moments a colt was seen gliding, like a fallow-deer, among the straight trunks of the pines; and, in another instant, the person of the ungainly man described in the preceding chapter, came into view, with as much rapidity as he could excite his meager beast to endure without coming to an open rupture.
This sentence strings together several clauses with a lot of modifiers. The simplest form of the sentence might be something like, "A colt came through the trees followed by an ungainly man on horseback." But Cooper packs in much more detail. The colt glides "like a fallow deer," the trees are straight pine trees, and the man's horse looks overworked. Cooper even makes his role as the narrator obvious by naming the man as someone he "described in the preceding chapter." This is a lot of information for one sentence to handle. Cooper avails himself of plenty of commas and even a semicolon.
This sentence is not an outlier in the novel. Even the characters speak in long descriptive sentences more than ordinary people might. The Mohicans and Hawkeye especially include a great deal of figurative language in their speech, as part of the dialect Cooper invents for them. Cooper does not seem to mind readers' awareness that they are reading a work of fiction that has been carefully crafted for them. He peppers the book with explanatory footnotes and interjects his opinion from time to time. This self-conscious style of narration was common in the 18th and 19th century. Cooper is also modeling his work directly after the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott and Cooper alike present their novels as romanticized history books, and they like to remind readers that they are both artists and curators of local history.
