The Last White Man: A Novel

“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”

This is the opening sentence of the novel and sets up the premise for the entire story in which residents of an unnamed town change from white to “brown.” The matter-of-fact way in which this bizarre occurrence is expressed is characteristic of magical realism, a literary genre. The opening is also a literary allusion, as it echoes the opening of Frantz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), in which the protagonist wakes to find that he has transformed into an insect.

“He was overtaken by emotion, not so much shock, or sorrow, though those things were there too, but above all the face replacing his filed him with anger, or rather, more than anger, an unexpected, murderous rage. He wanted to kill the colored man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself, as he was before.”

This sentence is an early example of the writing style employed throughout the text, the run-on sentence. While writers often see this as a grammatical error, the author uses them purposefully, often to evoke the interior thoughts or monologue of a character. Racist attitudes toward people of color are exposed, as the main emotion Anders feels in seeing he is now brown is one of murderous rage. The quote also suggests the postcolonial concept of “the Other” and a kind of internalized oppression or hatred, since the man he wants to kill is himself.