45 pages • 1 hour read
Mohsin HamidThe Last White Man: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 12-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary
Oona’s mother is unwilling to look at Oona’s face, focusing her eyes instead on her daughter’s jeans and shoes. Oona says that she is sorry. Her mother suggests they have breakfast. To Oona, this is the best thing her mother could have said. However, her mother is unable to stomach food, and becomes ill, retiring to her bedroom. Oona notices her reflection in the spoon. After she washes the dishes, she sees that her hands look chalky. When she rubs lotion on them, the chalkiness fades away. She visits Anders and apologizes. He thinks it is because his father is dying, but she is apologizing for her mother’s behavior. Most people have transitioned by now, and people have cleaned up most of the damage from the riots. Anders goes to the gym and finds that his boss has transitioned. He again wonders if those who had always been people of color could identify those who have recently changed, as he and Oona notice no difference. The narrator describes this inability as a kind of blindness, yet the other senses flourish.
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary
Oona’s mother is one of the last to transition. Oona worries that she may harm herself, but her mother seems relieved. Oona sees her mother looking at an attractive couple of color on social media, wondering if she had known them before they changed. Anders’s father dies on Christmas morning, and Anders is slow to react. Soon, however, he is crying uncontrollably. His father organized and paid for the funeral service and burial. Anders has a desire to dig the grave himself. The narrator does not know if this is because Anders idealized his father or if his father represented a connection to traditions from the past. Oona refers to Anders as “love” and realizes that she likes the way it sounds. Anders enjoys the funeral service, despite thinking that he would not. Anders’s father died without changing. He was the last white man.
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary
Oona and her mother are online, preparing for the end of the world, sure that the others could tell who they were even if they were blind to the difference of those who had changed and those who had not. Oona’s mother reads about the violence of people of color, especially those in power. She eventually stops spending so much time online because of what she sees in the real world and what the internet users claim is really happening. Since her change, she has not spoken much, but Oona notices that her mother is preparing to speak.
Oona and Anders visit his father’s grave. Anders feels fortunate for the first time in a long time. Oona and Anders don’t mind the graveyard, though many others do. Oona’s late brother hated graveyards, and she fought with him over visiting their father’s grave. To Oona, graveyards are all connected, like airports; Anders understands what she means. They are both able to feel the dead around them all the time. They believe that the dead are an important part of their lives.
On another evening, they have a drink in a bar. Oona realizes that no one looks out of place anymore. They visit a vegan restaurant where the owner may or may not recognize Oona. Or she may look the same way at everyone, as if an old and familiar customer. A dark man follows them, and Anders is ready to fight him if necessary. The man reacts by laughing and walking away.
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary
Oona’s mother is surprised and relieved when there is no reckoning against those who had been white and violent before. She misses being white, but she misses her daughter being white even more and longs for future white grandchildren. She feels bad for her earlier treatment of Anders and consoles him over the loss of his father. During the visit, she takes a picture of the young couple in love. She later posts the picture on social media and gets responses of approval.
Oona renews her driver’s license. The clerk at the DMV keeps looking at her photo, recognizing her. They decide to go for coffee. The clerk is her brother’s former lover. While previously handsome, he looks even better now, and he tells Oona that she does too. He has experienced many changes in his life, but the change in skin color was not the most significant.
Oona has moved into Anders’s house, and they fix it up together. She buys him a bicycle for his birthday, and they bike for coffee in the mornings before separating to go to work. Butterflies and insects are returning. Oona sees a woman with tattoos and wonders if she had them before changing. She hopes she had them before she changed, but she realizes that the woman may not have changed at all. Oona and Anders’s relationship has become more passionate. The gym is dusty and little used. The cleaning guy is the least changed of anyone. Anders finally tries to strike up a conversation, offering to train him in the gym. The cleaning guy says the only thing he wants is a raise.
Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary
It feels as if the town, or even the entire country, was in mourning. At other times, it feels the opposite, as if something new were being born. Both of these extremes suit Anders and Oona. The town engages in repairs, which reminds Anders of his father, sparking memories of love and nostalgia. While they renovate most of the house, they leave Anders’s childhood bedroom intact as a nod to the past or to the future, or both. Neither Oona nor Anders verbalize this significance.
The years speed by, and memories of whiteness recede. Oona and Anders have a daughter, and they want to tell her about her inheritance, her whiteness. It is Oona’s mother who speaks of the child’s ancestors, and of the whiteness that was still a part of them. The little girl, however, tells her grandmother to stop speaking of this past. Oona’s mother feels anger and loss, but the little girl holds her hands until these emotions pass. Now a teenager, their daughter separates emotionally from her parents, just as Oona and Anders settle into a relationship that is less passionate but increasingly comfortable. In the final scene, their daughter, returning from a night out with her friends, climbs between them in their bed, and Anders places his brown hand on the side of her brown face.
Part 3, Chapters 12-16 Analysis
Oona’s mother attempts to accept her daughter’s changes, but she becomes physically ill, thus highlighting the theme of The Construction of Race and Whiteness Theory: Oona’s mother holds a view of race and white supremacy that is too deeply ingrained to be changed. Oona has had time to prepare for the change, even practicing for it in the previous section. When she sees her reflection in the spoon, it is a repetition of the earlier scene when Anders sees himself in his phone and then in the mirror. An image in a spoon, however, is inverted, perhaps symbolizing the way Oona’s entire life and belief system has been turned upside down, along with that of her entire society. Her mother is one of the final people to transition, and though Oona worries, her mother is soon adjusted enough, looking at pictures of handsome couples online and eventually posting pictures of Oona and Anders. In some ways, she is the most dynamic of all the characters in the novel, changing from being a racist conspiracy theorist to the loving grandmother of a little girl of color.
The burial of Anders’s father is described in a titular quote—he is the last white man, and his death furthers the theme of Loss and Mourning. When his father dies, Anders, Oona, and her mother are able to embrace the mourning that the younger couple notice their town, or even their entire country, is experiencing (173). Mourning is the public expression of grief, the sadness that one feels after a loss. The feelings of grief can range from sadness to anger. All of the characters experience this range of the feelings at the loss of their whiteness, along with the privilege that accompanied it. Grief is an individual and often internalized feeling, resulting in a sense of uncertainty, paranoia, or even paralysis. Anders and Oona often wonder if they or other people are the same. Oona’s mother feeds her paranoia in online communities, and Anders fears leaving his house. Grief can also cause more physical reactions, like the desire to murder the changed face in the mirror, or nausea at seeing one’s daughter in bed with a person of color.
The characters’ shift into mourning, which mirrors a shared or public expression of loss, is essential to bringing the collective grief of society to a personal level that is comprehensible and relatable. As the text is a work of magical realism, grasping the feeling of a massive societal shift is challenging. Instead, Hamid presents a universally understood loss—the death of a loved one—to reimagine a feeling of change. In using Anders’s father as a symbol of the last bit of whiteness, the characters succeed in burying the past, mourning it, and still feeling it around them in the graveyard. This suggests that while change and loss can be accepted, what has altered is never really gone, so long as memory survives. For Oona’s mother, this remembering takes the form of storytelling, recalling the loss of her whiteness and sharing memories of this ancestry with her granddaughter. For Oona and Anders, this mourning and remembering occurs in the liminal space of the graveyard, which Oona says reminds her of airports. They are all connected, and they seem to be like a portal for her and Anders to connect with the dead, and therefore the past, both of which are with them every day of their lives. This provides a sense of closure for the literal losses of their family members, presenting them as alive in memory and still connected to them. Contrastingly, in their daughter, a more permanent closure is presented when the young girl tells her grandmother to forget the past. This suggests that while some things that are lost should be remembered and longed for, there are others that should be left in the past because they represent ideas that are harmful and intolerant. Indeed, people can be missed, but ideas that inflict pain should be, as the text suggests, forgotten. This section also provides resolution between characters: Oona’s mother realizes that she has behaved badly toward Anders and reaches out to comfort him when his father dies. Oona meets with her brother’s former lover and resolves some of her feelings about her brother. The years speed by, returning the novel to a less-realistic, more-magical or allegorical feel. A new generation is born, one that has no desire or need for the inheritance of whiteness and is instead comfortable and secure in itself.
Related Titles
By Mohsin Hamid
