One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown. This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm, subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him, male, darker, but this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible, and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not a separate person, but was just him, Anders, causing a wave of relief, for if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course the notion that he had changed color was a trick too, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact, born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness, except that by now he had his phone in his hands and he had reversed the camera, and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all.
From the first sentences of The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid signals to the reader that his novel borrows from the nightmarish and absurd work of Franz Kafka, whose novella The Metamorphosis begins with one of the most iconic opening lines in the history of modern literature: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." To update Kafka's premise, Hamid depicts his white protagonist, Anders, spontaneously developing brown skin overnight. With this absurd inciting incident, Hamid sets the tone for a meditative commentary on the social construction of racial identity.
The interior of the medicine cabinet was visible, the mirror door askew, and Anders raised his hand and swung his reflection into place before his eyes. It was not that of an Anders he recognized. He was overtaken by emotion, not so much shock, or sorrow, though those things were there too, but above all the face replacing his filled 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, and he slammed the side of his fist into the face, cracking it slightly, and causing the whole fitting, cabinet, mirror, and all, to skew, like a painting after an earthquake has passed.
After confirming the brown limbs in his bed belong to him, Anders goes to his bathroom to look in the mirror. In this passage, Anders's prevailing emotion is one of anger as he takes in his new image. While Hamid reveals little about the unnamed country in which the book is set, the author hints at the poor state of race relations within the majority-white society through Anders's violent response to his transformation. Trying to destroy his own image, Anders feels that his white privilege has been taken from him. His action also foreshadows the conflict to come as more people find themselves inexplicably transformed.
When Anders got back in his car it occurred to him that the three people he had seen were all white, and that he was perhaps being paranoid, inventing meaning out of details that might not matter, and at a traffic light he confronted his gaze in the rearview mirror, looked for the whiteness there, for it must be somewhere, maybe in his expression, but he could not see it, and the more he looked the less white he seemed, as though looking for his whiteness was the opposite of whiteness, was driving it further away, making him seem desperate, or uncertain, or like he did not belong, he who had been born here, damn it, and then he heard the loud continuous horn of the car to his rear, and he started to move past a signal that had some seconds ago turned green, and the woman behind him swerved to overtake...
On his first excursion out of the house after changing skin color, Anders goes to the grocery store. He has his initial experience of "double consciousness," the dual self-perception of a subordinated person within an oppressive society. As he shops, Anders cannot help but see himself through the imagined gaze of the white people around him, who he suspects are judging him or fearful of him. Once in the car, he wonders whether he wasn't just imagining things. While looking in the rearview mirror, Anders tries to find in his image the whiteness he associates with his humanity; without the whiteness, he feels he doesn't belong in his society. In this way, Hamid sheds light on the unconscious privilege of white people like Anders, who only realizes how much he depends on his white identity once that identity has disappeared.
The mood in town was changing, more rapidly than its complexion, for Anders could not as yet perceive any real shift in the number of dark people on the streets, or if he could, he could not be sure of it, those who had changed still being, by all accounts, few and far between, but the mood, yes, the mood was changing, and the shelves of the stores were more bare, and at night the roads were more abandoned, and even the days were shorter and cooler than they had been only recently, the leaves no longer as confident in their green, and while these seasonal shifts were perhaps only the course of things, the course of things felt to Anders more fraught.
In The Last White Man, the entirety of the white population changes color, one person at a time, over the course of the fall and winter. In this passage, the narrator comments on the shifting mood of Anders's town when the changes begin in the fall. In response to so many people inexplicably losing their whiteness (as most changed people perceive it), people become paranoid about society collapsing, thereby contributing to that potential collapse by stockpiling supplies for an assumed cataclysmic event. The paranoid mood coincides with shorter, cooler days as the change in season sets the backdrop for what promises to be a conflict-ridden winter.
There were flare-ups of violence in town, a brawl here, a shooting there, and the mayor repeatedly called for calm, but militants had begun to appear on the streets, pale-skinned militants, some dressed almost like soldiers in combat uniform, or halfway like soldiers, with military-style trousers and civilian jackets, and others dressed like hunters, in woodland colors, or in jeans and ammunition vests, but all the militants, whatever their attire, visibly armed, and as for the police, the police made no real effort to stop them.
The militants did not confront Oona when, on occasion, she ran into them. They did not hassle her, no more than a group of men might normally hassle a woman out on her own, even less, possibly because she was white, or because they figured she supported them, for she wore no sign or badge of her disapproval and kept her mouth shut, but she had lingered too late at her share of drunken parties in high school and college, and she knew the feeling the militants gave her, the feeling that they were together and she was alone, and that her situation could change in an instant, and she did not bike anymore, she drove, and they frightened her.
But her mother seemed positively jolly, on a high, as though she had just heavily upped her mood medications…
As increasingly more white people "lose" their skin color and privilege, confusion and paranoia breed fear among the population, and violence becomes a constant on the streets. Afraid that their "kind" are being eradicated, white militant groups form to become the de facto police in the country. While Oona perceives the militants as hostile and menacing, Oona's mother has the opposite response, seeing the militants as kindred spirits who will protect her from being turned brown—an inevitability the militants have no control over. With these contrasting perceptions, Hamid shows how reactionary paramilitary groups can take advantage of an emotionally pitched context, excusing their violent persecution of minorities by posing as protectors and peacekeepers.
Anders’s father was not yet used to Anders, to how Anders looked, and in a sense he had never been used to him, not even when Anders was a child, silent for so long, struggling to tie his laces or to write in a handwriting that people could read, for Anders’s father, while not a particularly good student, had always been competent, competent at the tasks he was given, and not just in school, outside it, too, but his son, his son was different, a difference the boy’s mother took to naturally, and so the boy became her boy, and there were walls between him and his son, and Anders’s father could understand the bullies who had picked on his son when his son was small, and he could understand those who wanted him gone from town now, who were afraid of him, or threatened by him, by the dark man his boy had become, and they had a right to be, he would have felt the same in their shoes, he liked it no better than they did, and he could see the end his boy signaled, the end of things, he was not blind, but they would not take his boy, not easily, not from him, the boy’s father, and whatever Anders was, whatever his skin was, he was still his father’s son, and still his mother’s son, and he came first, before any other allegiance, he was what truly mattered, and Anders’s father was ready to do right by his son, it was a duty that meant more to him than life, and he wished he had more life in him, but he would do what he could with what little life he had.
In this instance of free-indirect narration, the omniscient narrator relates the innermost thoughts of Anders's father as he tries to see past his own racial prejudice and accept his son for who he has become. The rambling thoughts establish that Anders's father has always felt alienated from his son, whose mediocrity and awkwardness he has struggled to understand. But while Anders's father can sympathize with the white militants who see dark people as a threat, Anders's father puts their familial ties above racial ties. Though he is sick and dying, Anders's father commits himself to giving everything he has to protecting his son from being harmed by racists he would otherwise have supported.
Anders had thought he would hate the funeral service but he did not hate the funeral service, it was comforting to be with these other people who came to offer their respects, and Anders did not know who was who and which was which, not until they introduced themselves, although occasionally he could guess, and there were not many of them, but there were enough, the right number, all those who were present being those who cared, and the ceremony did what it was meant to do, which was to make real what had happened and to weave Anders and those others left behind into a shared web of what they had lost, and Anders’s pale father was the only pale person present, the only pale person left in the entire town, for there were by that point no others, and then his casket was closed and his burial was occurring and he was committed to the soil, the last white man, and after that, after him, there were none.
In this passage, Hamid reveals that Anders's father is the "last white man" of the book's title. By the time of Anders's father's open-casket funeral, every person in the town has changed color, leaving Anders's father to be the only pale face in the room during the service. Referencing the major theme of grief, the narrator comments on the room of mourners saying goodbye not only to Anders's father, but also to the era of whiteness in their society.
Of everyone there, the cleaning guy seemed the least changed, and Anders watched him go about his work, and wanted to strike up a conversation, but none of his attempts really went anywhere, and that day Anders had an idea, and he waited until late, and no one else was nearby, and he said to the cleaning guy, I could train you, you could work out here sometimes, like the rest of us do, would you like that, and the cleaning guy looked at Anders and said, no, and then he added, less abruptly, and not with a smile, or not with a smile on his lips, although perhaps with one in his eyes, it was difficult to tell, honestly it could have been the opposite of a smile, and with that peculiar expression, the cleaning guy added, what I would like is a raise.
After his transformation, Anders feels a new affinity with the brown-skinned cleaner at his gym. Anders realizes he has never engaged with the man other than to politely greet him, and he wonders if he ought to speak with the man to learn something about what it is like to be a minority within society. Anders thinks about the man throughout the novel, wishing to speak with him. When they finally do speak, Anders believes he can connect with the scrawny man by offering to train him to use the gym. In an instance of situational irony, the man has no interest in working out. The most helpful thing Anders could do for the man is get him more money for the poorly paid work he does. With this revelation, Hamid shows how Anders has imagined so much about the cleaner, who turns out to have no interest in connecting with Anders and has no wisdom to share; he is simply a humble man making a living.
Sometimes it felt like the town was a town in mourning, and the country a country in mourning, and this suited Anders, and suited Oona, coinciding as it did with their own feelings, but at other times it felt like the opposite, that something new was being born, and strangely enough this suited them too.
In this passage, taken from the last chapter of the novel, the narrator comments on the mixed emotions prevalent in Anders's and Oona's town after every white person has transformed. While many people still grapple with the loss of their white identity, feeling a sense of racial mourning, they simultaneously feel a sense of renewal and optimism. Now that their society is racially homogenous, the era of violence, paranoia, and upheaval is over. In this new reality, Anders and Oona and everyone else can get on with what is actually important in life, no longer distracted by the superficial differences of socially constructed race.
Anders would be reminded of his father when he saw such things, and even more when he smelled such things, when he smelled cement or wet paint or unfinished lumber, and his memories of his father were not all pleasant, they were painful too, and while Anders thought he had done well by his father, especially at the end, he was not sure just how well he had done, and he suspected, or worried, that his father had not been sure either, had not been sure how Anders had done, and maybe that was the way it was for fathers and sons, or certain fathers and certain sons, but there was a love there too, Anders had the sense that his father did love him, and that he, Anders, did love his father, that they did not, in the final judgment, judge one another harshly, and this sense carried Anders through.
At the end of the novel, Anders is still processing his complicated relationship with his father. Having always been more his mother's child than his father's, Anders grew up sensing his father's inability to identify with him. However, the support Anders and his father showed each other during the tumultuous winter brought about a new sense of understanding between the men. Each putting the other's needs before their own, Anders and his father learned they were not so dissimilar, despite their superficial differences, with deeper values like love and selflessness holding more power than prejudice.
