Hillbilly Elegy Literary Elements

Autobiography, Family Memoir

The action takes place in Appalachia and the Rust Belt, spanning from the late 1850s until present day.

The story is presented from a first-person, subjective point of view.

Resilient, sobering, sociological, heartfelt, soul-bearing, unflinching, optimistic, critical.

The protagonist is the narrator/author, J.D. Vance. The antagonist is his mother, Bev—and, in a broader sense, his own history, which he must overcome to succeed.

The major conflict is Vance's struggle to succeed despite his hillbilly roots, family environment, and socio-cultural obstacles.

The book reaches its climax when Mamaw, the foremost figure in Vance's life, dies.

-Bev’s future drug addiction is foreshadowed in the first chapter when Vance mentions that his family was affected by the environment affected by the drug epidemic.
-Vance's eventual matriculation at Yale Law School is foreshadowed in the first chapter.
-Vance foreshadows Mamaw's eventual death when he signs up for the Marine Corps and imagines his life four years later: "I saw a world without my grandmother in it" (158).

-Vance's statement that his mother has a few boyfriends is an understatement, as Vance later reveals that his mother had new boyfriends almost every other month.

-Vance alludes to the legendary feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, a story from American history and a small-time war that left dozens of men from both families dead. Vance's grandfather was a distant cousin of a Hatfield.
-Vance alludes to an episode of the TV show "The West Wing" in which the characters discuss public school vouchers, with which Vance had firsthand experience.

-The image of J.D. fleeing his mother as she threatens to kill him is a vivid one, as he describes running through tall blades of Ohio grass and into a stranger's yard, where a woman swims in her pool. This is a crystallized image of the desperation in the face of his mother's temper and addiction that Vance felt as a child.
-Vance describes his Papaw's love for the Armco steel he helped produce by describing each time Papaw saw American-made cars that used that steel; Papaw felt the steel and proudly said that Armco made it.
-Vance's account of the fights his mother engaged in with her various boyfriends and husbands are vivid and violent, particularly when he describes the plates she often threw at her lovers.
-Perhaps the salient image of Mamaw getting revenge on Papaw for his alcoholism is that of her setting him on fire one day.
-Vance's account of his father's farm in Kentucky is a happy, vivid one, depicting him lying in the grass, petting a collie. He calls this the happiest memory of his childhood.

-It is paradoxical that being raised mostly by women made Vance a better man.
-It is paradoxical that it took attending Yale University, so vastly different from Middletown, for Vance to notice the similarities between his hillbilly community back at home and himself.

-In the introduction, Vance introduces one of the people with whom he used to work before going to college: a 19-year-old man who got his girlfriend pregnant. The boy was offered a job at a tile company and, while the pay was good, the work was also extremely hard. For Vance, this was not a problem because he was willing to work to make an honest dollar. The young man, however, came up with excuses, blaming others for his own situation and being unwilling to work hard. Vance draws a parallel between himself and the young man, claiming that in some situations, the reason why some people were poor is not that the system was against them, but rather that they were unwilling to work hard enough to make it.
-Vance draws a parallel between himself and Brian, a teenager living in Middletown whose mother faced the same addiction issues his own mother did. He hopes that Brian will receive the support that his family and friends gave him as a child; without it, Vance says, Brian will likely fail to be upwardly mobile.

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