Yellowface Literary Elements

Literary fiction

Washington D.C., post-Trump

First-person, June's perspective.

Because the novel tightly follows June's point of view, it takes on the tone or mood that corresponds to her state of mind, which oscillates between meticulous calculation, excitement when she gets published, paranoia over being discovered as a plagiarizer, and later, extreme anxiety over the figure of Athena's ghost and the various scandals that surface around her work.

June is the protagonist; the publishing industry is one antagonist, although at various points, Candice, Geoff, and the figure of "Athena Liu's Ghost" through a social media account (@AthenaLiusGhost) run by Candice also act as antagonists.

The central conflict, which over the course of the novel manifests as a series of scandals and more minor, ongoing conflicts, is the fact that June must keep the fact that she plagiarized Athena's manuscript a secret. This leads to one of the other main conflicts between her and Candice, which ultimately leads to June's injury and Candice securing a deal for a tell-all memoir that will reveal June's plagiarism.

In an unconventional manner, the novel has two emotional peaks that come at the beginning and end, as opposed to part-way through, breaking away from the traditional "Freytag's pyramid" model where the climax occurs with enough narrative space for a denouement, or falling action that explores the consequences of the climax. At the beginning, Athena's death is one climax; at the end, the reveal that Candice is @AthenaLiusGhost and has been harassing June is the concluding climax.

When Candice is dismissed from her position as Danielle's assistant and June notes that this means Candice will be almost unable to get another job in publishing, the novel foreshadows Candice seeking revenge against June. June also sees Candice's negative review of her book on Goodreads, which further foreshadows Candice's importance for the overall narrative.

June understates the severity of her plagiarism by finding various excuses that justify her actions. She understates her intent with claims that she didn't "mean" to do what she did, and lies to her publishing team by understating the extent to which she copied Athena.

Athena and June connect over Elif Batuman's novel The Idiot, a 2017 bildungsroman that follows a young college student through her first year at Harvard. The Last Front, June's novel that plagiarizes Athena's manuscript, also alludes to the real-life historical Chinese Labour Corps. There are also allusions to recent contemporary politics, such as the alt-right movement or Trump and Biden. Additionally, June alludes to several male authors who survived "cancellation" and were able to have successful careers despite facing sexual assault or physical abuse accusations, including Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and David Foster Wallace.

The novel's imagery becomes visceral and dramatic during Athena's death scene and the flashbacks June later experiences of it.

June desperately wants to write but can't come up with any ideas of her own, and therefore plagiarizes the work of others—even when she doesn't mean to, as she does when subconsciously copying the stories of the students she teaches at a summer workshop.

Athena and Geoff parallel each other; they are both white, both had failed first novels, and both were close to Athena—close enough that she borrowed from their personal lives and wrote about them in her fiction without their permission or knowledge. Athena and June also parallel each other, meeting in college, studying the same subject, and both trying to get into publishing, albeit with diverging levels of success.

Athena's memory becomes personified by the hoax figure that Candice constructs using Photoshop.