The Last White Man Literary Elements

Speculative Fiction; Dystopian Fiction

The novel is set in an unnamed English-speaking, majority-white country in which every white citizen spontaneously transforms to being brown skinned.

The book is narrated by an unnamed third-person omniscient narrator; the point of view stays mainly with Anders or Oona, moving occasionally to secondary characters.

The tone is contemplative and stream-of-conscious; the mood is mournful yet optimistic.

The protagonist is Anders. The primary antagonists are the white militants, Anders's boss, and Oona's mother.

The major conflict is that Anders, having lost the privilege of his white skin overnight, must get on with his life while being subject to casual and overt prejudice.

The climax comes when every white person in society transforms into a brown person and people embrace each other without discrimination.

Anders's boss's insensitive comment that he would kill himself if he turned brown foreshadows the news reports of people committing suicide after they've changed color.

The opening sentence of the novel is an allusion to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, which features a man waking up one morning to discover he has transformer into a giant insect.

An example of olfactory imagery occurs when Hamid describes the scent of plant growth, which Oona's mother associates with more carefree days:: "... some sunny days it was warm enough to open the windows in the early afternoon, and the smell that entered the house was that spring smell, that smell her husband had once called with a wink the smell of the time to frolic."

After everyone has transformed into brown people, former white supremacists cling to their racist identities by claiming they should still live separately from originally brown people and those who were once white.

An example of parallelism occurs with the structure of the phrase: "... unremarkable in size and heft, unremarkable except in not being his."