T HE MOST POPULAR of novels of James Fenimore Cooper, The LLast of Mohicans, is also, it would seem, his most ambiguous. Over years it has attracted more critical attention than any other of Cooper's works, and yet few commentators agree in their judgments of its major implications. The explanation of disagreement may be that questions which are usually addressed to novel-questions which seek to ascertain theological, ethical, and sociological positions it takes-are inappropriate and hence incapable of yielding conclusive answers. Such questions presuppose existence of conscious intellectual control by novelist over materials of his fiction and assume that those materials are ordered in an ideological scheme which, once identified, will unlock meaning of book. Surely those are reasonable expectations to bring to most of Cooper's novels, in some of which, indeed, imaginative life of fiction is constrained by schematization to point of suffocation. But in The Last of Mohicans, situation would seem to be reversed. The very sources of its popularity-its nearly pornographic obsession with violence, its Gothicism and fantasy-suggest that book is profoundly different in nature from Cooper's other fiction. Its gestures toward historicity and toward novelistic convention are gestures merely, for here ordering and informing intelligence of artist succeeds in establishing only most superficial control over activities of imagination. The ideological elusiveness of The Last of Mohicans has led to curiously conflicting interpretations of its central figure, Leatherstocking. In view of Robert Spiller, Cooper represents Natty Bumppo in this novel as the Christian man of nature, an indication of novelist's complete acceptance of Protestant ethical tradition qualified by a rejection . .. of social sophistications and corruptions which had resulted in three centuries of evolution