James Fennimore Cooper's book The Last of the Mohicans is designed
             to entertain us the way that any novel would, for it is replete with
             entertaining characters and swashbuckling deeds. However, Cooper also
             wanted to do more than simply entertain his readers. He wanted to make
             them more aware of what was happening in the world around them, of how the
             coming to America of the Europeans had changed the entire natural and
             social order of the New World. And in order to impress on his readers the
             seriousness of those changes he chose the most potent symbol possible:
             That of blood. This paper analyzes the use of the symbol of blood in this
             novel.
             Cooper uses blood to stand for a number of different ideas in the
             book. It serves, first of all, as a symbol for knowledge and even more
             specifically for the ways in which we come to know our way in the world -
             how things come to be "in our blood". When European settlers came to
             America in the 17th century, they found themselves in a world that was
             entirely alien to them. They had neither literal maps to the country nor
             any metaphorical ones to understand their relationship to new kinds of
             plants and animals, new kinds of soil to be hoed and planted, new kinds of
             people who spoke in languages unheard to them and prayed to gods that they
             knew nothing at all about. And in the midst of this disorientation, they
             turned to the one thing that they knew tied them absolutely and
             irrevocably to the past - specifically to their own past but also to the
             past of the world: The blood that ran in their veins and that connected
             them to their homes and their families, to the safe and the familiar. By
             looking to the blood ties, they looked backward to home.
             One of the central concepts in The Last of the Mohicans is the idea of
             natural law, which both Cooper and his main character, Natty Bumpo, hold to
             be of far greater impo...