Old Yeller Literary Elements

Fiction

Frontier Texas in the late 1860s

First-person point of view from the adult perspective of a 14-year-old farm boy looking back on the events.

The mood is tragic, set by the information provided immediately that the young boy narrating the tale is inevitably going to have to kill his pet dog. The straightforward realistic tone of the narration keeps the tragic quality of the narrative from collapsing into melodramatic sentimentality.

Protagonist: Travis Coates, narrator. Antagonist: Rabies (referred to as hydrophobia in the novel)

Man versus nature. The conflict pits young Travis against the uncontrollable forces of nature by forcing him to kill the dog he loves in order to save his family from contracting rabies.

Old Yeller contracts rabies after a defensive confrontation with the rabid wolf and becomes a threat to the narrator, his family, friends, and various other assorted animals and humans. The climactic mercy killing of the dog becomes the climactic realization of information the reader learns in the book’s second paragraph.

The end is foreshadowed at the beginning with the direct assertion by the narrator that Old Yeller’s life came to an end when he had to shoot the dog. All the other details of this ending remain unexplained until the linear progression of the narrative reveals them.

That assertion in the second paragraph is a masterpiece of understatement. In its arrival made in the utter absence of contextual information about the circumstances in which the future killing takes place, even the slightly hyperbolic reference to being a family member fails to impact the jaw-dropping quality of its understated realism. “He made me so mad at first that I wanted to kill him. Then, later, when I had to kill him, it was like having to shoot some of my own folks.”

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Throughout the book, imagery is used to compare humans to animals and animals to humans. This pervasive engagement of similes has the collective effect of diminishing the distinction between the species, lightly suggesting all of earth’s inhabitants are in this thing together: “I saw the bear lunge up to stand on her hind feet like a man.” “I raced through the tall trees in that creek bottom, covering ground like a scared wolf.” “I was so mad at Little Arliss I could have wrung his neck like a frying chicken’s.”

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The classic threefold parallel structure is used when the narrator describes the habit of his little brother Arliss to scream: “Well, Little Arliss was a screamer by nature. He’d scream when he was happy and scream when he was mad and a lot of times he’d scream just to hear himself make a noise.”

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The narrator is talking with his mother about the behavior of two longhorn range bulls and infuses the description with personification: “That old bull’s talking fight…He’s bragging that he’s the biggest and toughest and meanest. He’s telling all the other bulls that if they’ve got a lick of sense, they’ll take to cover when he’s around.”