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Old Yeller Summary and Analysis

FreeBookNotes found 6 sites with book summaries or analysis of Old Yeller . If there is a Old Yeller SparkNotes, Shmoop guide, or Cliff Notes, you can find a link to each study guide below.

Among the summaries and analysis available for Old Yeller , there are 1 Full Study Guide, 2 Short Summaries and 3 Book Reviews.

Depending on the study guide provider (SparkNotes, Shmoop, etc.), the resources below will generally offer Old Yeller chapter summaries, quotes, and analysis of themes, characters, and symbols.

by Fred Gipson

Full book notes and study guides.

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eNotes - Old Yeller

Short book summaries.

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SuperSummary (Plot Summaries) - Old Yeller

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Book reviews.

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AllReaders - Old Yeller

Word Count: 132

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Word Count: 118

GoodReads - Old Yeller

Our summary of old yeller by fred gipson.

Old Yeller has been a family favorite for many generations. It is the story of a dog who comes to live with the Coates family while the father is away on a cattle drive. The oldest son, Travis, is very reserved and reluctant to have the dog in their family. Arliss, the younger son, has no such issue and welcomes the dog gladly. Old Yeller becomes protector, friend, and companion for the boys and their mother. Fred Gipson's book was so popular that he wrote two more books about the Coates family and their adventures. The book was also made into a Disney movie and has become a classic film.

Old Yeller Literary Elements

By fred gipson.

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Setting and Context

Frontier Texas in the late 1860s

Narrator and Point of View

First-person point of view from the adult perspective of a 14-year-old farm boy looking back on the events.

Tone and Mood

The mood is tragic, set by the information provided immediately that the young boy narrating the tale is inevitably going to have to kill his pet dog. The straightforward realistic tone of the narration keeps the tragic quality of the narrative from collapsing into melodramatic sentimentality.

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist: Travis Coates, narrator. Antagonist: Rabies (referred to as hydrophobia in the novel)

Major Conflict

Man versus nature. The conflict pits young Travis against the uncontrollable forces of nature by forcing him to kill the dog he loves in order to save his family from contracting rabies.

Old Yeller contracts rabies after a defensive confrontation with the rabid wolf and becomes a threat to the narrator, his family, friends, and various other assorted animals and humans. The climactic mercy killing of the dog becomes the climactic realization of information the reader learns in the book’s second paragraph.

Foreshadowing

The end is foreshadowed at the beginning with the direct assertion by the narrator that Old Yeller’s life came to an end when he had to shoot the dog. All the other details of this ending remain unexplained until the linear progression of the narrative reveals them.

Understatement

That assertion in the second paragraph is a masterpiece of understatement. In its arrival made in the utter absence of contextual information about the circumstances in which the future killing takes place, even the slightly hyperbolic reference to being a family member fails to impact the jaw-dropping quality of its understated realism. “He made me so mad at first that I wanted to kill him. Then, later, when I had to kill him, it was like having to shoot some of my own folks.”

Throughout the book, imagery is used to compare humans to animals and animals to humans. This pervasive engagement of similes has the collective effect of diminishing the distinction between the species, lightly suggesting all of earth’s inhabitants are in this thing together: “I saw the bear lunge up to stand on her hind feet like a man.” “I raced through the tall trees in that creek bottom, covering ground like a scared wolf.” “I was so mad at Little Arliss I could have wrung his neck like a frying chicken’s.”

Parallelism

The classic threefold parallel structure is used when the narrator describes the habit of his little brother Arliss to scream: “Well, Little Arliss was a screamer by nature. He’d scream when he was happy and scream when he was mad and a lot of times he’d scream just to hear himself make a noise.”

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Personification.

The narrator is talking with his mother about the behavior of two longhorn range bulls and infuses the description with personification: “That old bull’s talking fight…He’s bragging that he’s the biggest and toughest and meanest. He’s telling all the other bulls that if they’ve got a lick of sense, they’ll take to cover when he’s around.”

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Old Yeller Questions and Answers

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What is the antagonist

Arliss is Travis's younger brother. Travis takes on the responsibility of looking after him and keeping an eye on him. At one point in the story, Arliss is saved from a bear by Old Yeller, which changes Travis's opinion about the dog. Like Arliss,...

Study Guide for Old Yeller

Old Yeller study guide contains a biography of Fred Gipson, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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When his father sets out on a cattle drive for the summer, fourteen-year-old Travis is left to take care of his family and their farm, and he faces new, unanticipated and often perilous responsibilities in the wilderness of early fronteir Texas.

But Travis is not alone. He finds help and comfort in the courage and unwavering love of the stray animal who comes to be his most loyal and very best friend: the big yellow dog Travis calls “Old Yeller.”

An enduring and award-winning American classic, Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller stands as one of the most beloved novels ever produced in this country, and one that will live in the hearts and minds of readers for generations to come.

When a novel like Huckleberry Finn , or The Yearling , comes along it defies customary adjectives because of the intensity of the respouse it evokes in the reader. Such a book, we submit, is  Old Yeller;  to read this eloquently simple story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country is an unforgettable and deeply moving experience.

Newbery Honor Book

57 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Chapters 1-4 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 summary.

Travis Coates recalls the events that happened when he was 14, during the late 1860s following the American Civil War. That summer, a “dingy yellow” or “yeller” dog comes into his life (1). At first, Travis resents the dog, then comes to love it. When he must kill the dog, it is as hard as killing a family member.

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