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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Face in the Mirror
Content Warning: This guide discusses racism, suicide, substance use disorder, and violence.
The face in the mirror is a foundational scene early in the novel when Anders discovers that he has changed overnight. Also published as an excerpt from the novel in the May 16, 2022 edition of The New Yorker, the mirror is a richly layered symbol with philosophical and literary connotations. Post-structuralist and philosopher Jacques Lacan argues that humans pass through stages in their lives, from the Realist stage of the infant to the Imaginary or Mirror stage of the toddler, which is the realm of images, consciousness, self-awareness and the ego. This is the stage when the individual becomes dependent on things outside the self, such as language, other people and external objects. When Anders sees the face in the mirror (after first seeing it on his phone), his overwhelming reaction is one of murderous rage. The mirror stage is the moment of recognition as an “I”—yet for Anders, that “I” has been stripped of its privilege of whiteness and has become the race of the degenerate Other, a concept often found in psychology and philosophy to describe those marginalized by a society. Anders wants to murder this image that has robbed him of his identity and his privilege. He checks his reflection several times after his change, on his phone, in his vanity mirror, in his car’s rear view mirror, hoping that he will change back (5) or looking for traces of whiteness (8).
As in this novel and Lacanian theory, the mirror symbolizes awareness, but can also stand for truth-telling or wisdom, and at times can be a premonition of death. There are many artistic allusions for the image of “the man in the mirror.” Dale Wimbrow’s poem “The Man in the Mirror” (1934; originally “The Guy in the Glass”) reminds the general reader that the only opinion that matters in the end is one’s own. Michael Jackson’s popular hit “The Man in the Mirror” (1988) pushes his image to make an honest assessment of himself as the first step toward changing. When Oona first sees her reflection in the mirror, even after seeing a preview in her spoon and practicing the change through make-up and photoshopped images, she sees only a stranger (121). However, as the truth and reality of her change sinks in, this stranger slowly morphs into an image that is “undeniably Oona” (121). Anders feels like he has been robbed of his whiteness. This could be a harbinger of the loss or death that he experiences on a personal level later in the novel. The death of his father, who is the last white man, is also a death of the pernicious construct of whiteness, echoing the death of Anders the white man when he confronts his face in the mirror.
The Gym
Anders is a personal trainer in a gym which the narrator describes as “a black iron gym, a rough gym, where men, and it was usually only men, tested themselves with barbells against gravity, not some shiny place with chrome-plated machines” (37). It is a highly masculinized symbolic space, smelling of sweat (35), where older, white men desperately sought to push back the ravages of gravity through exercise. Anders is popular there, called “doc” by the older men who seek his advice on easing the physical and psychological pains of life and aging (37). The word gym is the shortened version of gymnasium, and originated in ancient Greece not only as a way for men to demonstrate their physical prowess but also to pay homage to the gods. The men in the gym use traditional and masculine means to try and keep the aging (or gravity the novel calls it) at bay, suggesting a cult of youth inherent to the white masculinity that the novel critiques. Like one of its original uses in the ancient world, modern gyms can also function as a site of worship.
While gyms can serve as an equalizing space, where people of different backgrounds can mix in the performance of the shared fitness activities, this gym is much more exclusionary. Its members are primarily older and white, and when Anders first changes, his boss tells him that he would have killed himself in Anders condition. His boss is somewhat of a menacing character, capable of attacking others before a lifting competition as he enters into his “berzerker zone” (36). This term berserker comes from Old Norse literature and is used to describe a type of warrior who entered a frenzied state before battle. Berserkers are often a symbol of hyper-masculinity, and further a symbol popular among white supremacist groups; symbols of Nordic mythology are extremely common in white supremacist aesthetics.
The only person of color in the gym before the change happens is the man whom Anders refers to as “the cleaning guy.” Anders realizes that “the cleaning guy was the only guy at the gym who never exercised there” (53). But his offer to train him for free demonstrates how little meaningful interaction there has been, as the cleaning guy tells Anders he would prefer a raise. While both Anders and Oona are described as youthful and fit (18), the forms and sites of exercise are different. She teaches yoga in a studio, and “her clients [are] quite different from those of Anders, mostly women, and while not wealthy, wealthier by local standards, and more educated, staving off aging through attempts to remain supply, and relatively slender, in surrounding where human smells were banished” (39). Despite the differences, both gym and studio are sites where the worship of idolatrized youth results only in denial, grief and loss.
The Graveyard
The graveyard is a rich symbolic space in the novel. Although it does not appear until near the end of the novel, its existence lurks around a novel focusing on death and loss. There are two graveyards in the novel. The first is where Oona’s father and brother are buried, a place she rarely visits. This is a place from Oona’s past which she before the change happened, like the grave of Anders’s mother which he also had rarely visited. However, since the change and the death of Anders’s father (the last white man), graveyards have taken on a different meaning for the two young lovers, who now felt “at home” (153) among the dead whom they felt “daily, hourly, as they lived their lives” (155). Oona tells Anders that “graveyards were like airports, they were all connected” (154-55), smiling and asking him if he understood. It is not entirely clear if the connected “they” are graveyards themselves, or the dead and living in them. After his father’s death, Anders has a strong desire to dig his father’s grave himself. The narrator here, as elsewhere, is unclear as to why: “Maybe Anders idealized his father and maybe Anders’s father was a connection to the distant past for Anders, to traditions with which Anders was not year familiar and would not now ever be familiar” (146).
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By Mohsin Hamid
