The Vanishing Half Literary Elements

Historical fictional novel.

United States between 1940 and 1990. Jim Crow South (Louisiana) through the Civil Rights era and into the 1990s, spanning between Louisiana and Los Angeles.

Third-person omniscient narrator.

The tone is one of story-telling. The mood varies but is often sympathetic to the characters.

The protagonists are Stella and Desiree Vignes, as well as Desiree's daughter Jude Winston.

The major conflict is around living one's true life and setting one's own course, in the context of racial oppression and colorism.

The climax in the story occurs when Stella is pressed by Jude and Kennedy into telling the truth about her background.

When Stella privately uses a racial slur to describe a Black child to her daughter Kennedy, this foreshadows Kennedy's later (public) use of the same slur, as well as Kennedy's racist remarks as an adult.

"You don't understand," she said. "When I think about who I was before him. It's like being a whole other person."

On p. 261, Stella explains to Peg why she can't leave Blake. Stella commenting that it's "like" she was a whole other person before she met Blake is an understatement, since she literally lived a different life.

The story alludes to the surrounding racial context of the Jim Crow South. Leon's death is not an anomaly, but part of a pattern of white supremacist murders. Later, the story alludes to an LGBT community in Los Angeles that spans beyond the characters we get to know well. It is implied that another character in the narrative may be trans as well, but is unlikely to fully come out.

Description of the town of Mallard, description of the twins' early life together, description of the passionate relationships between some of the characters.

Stella's life as a white woman hinges on the secrecy of her past. However, she is unable to fully bury her past on an emotional level.
Additionally, though the material conditions of Stella's life are decadent, her life is emotionally stunted in a way that Desiree's is not.

"It was impossible to ever be angry at that smile, and Kennedy had tested it often: when she'd begged for a puppy but left Yolanda to care for him, when she'd failed ninth-grade geometry in spite of Stella's attempts to help her, when she'd crashed her first Camaro and, somehow, convinced Blake to buy her a second one." (p. 286)

This sentence uses parallelism through the repetition of the phrase/structure, "when she."

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The town of Mallard is personified as a character in the novel. The beliefs and behaviors of the townspeople are attributed to the town itself.