The Pathfinder

"In The Pathfinder,Cooper resuscitated the figure of Natty Bumppo, returning the Leather-Stocking to the New York forest. The imagination that revived Natty from the grave was intent on the author's own return, not just to modes he had seemingly abandoned, but to a position of moral authority in a republic about which he was deeply worried. Although Cooper still believed in the democratic-republican creed of Jefferson and Jackson, he agreed with the Commodore in Home as Found that America most of all needed "Washington and Natty Bumppo" again. As for the second part of that team, Cooper was only to happy to oblige. He offered him as "the Pathfinder" (another of his happy coinages in the series of novels)--Pathfinder for the nation, not just for Mabel Dunham and her party. Natty Bumppo would come to play a crucial role in the book because of its eventually amphibious nature--for the book as finished combined Cooper's two most successful arenas of action, the forest and the sea. The Pathfinder would also, and again with regard to Natty, fuse adventure tale with love plot. Cooper had made love part of his stories in the previous Leather-Stocking Tales, but (with the notable exception of Cora and Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans) always among his upper-class white characters, so that Natty's new vulnerability to sexual passion marks a turn in the class dynamics of Cooper's fiction. Natty is not the stoic, sexless figure of the first three books but rather a man of flesh and blood. He also has a more truly social existence than the three earlier books accorded him" --