47 pages • 1 hour read
Gene Luen YangDragon Hoops
Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Atmosphere
Atmosphere is created when an author uses objects, settings, or language that help readers better understand—and elicit the reader’s reaction surrounding—the characters, their circumstances, and their motives. As a graphic novel, Dragon Hoops uses atmosphere through both words and images. If the setting is a book’s physical location, atmosphere is the mood evoked in the reader by such a setting.
In tandem with his change of settings and temporal moments within the nonfiction memoir, Yang uses atmosphere in various ways. For example, Yang establishes an atmosphere of suspense by showing gymnasiums that are full of spectators. He shows the beads of sweat on the players’ faces as they are dribbling, shooting, or executing another play in the heat of the game. Next, he occasionally uses several comic panels to showcase one shot, such as in the final show from Coach Lou’s own high school championship game, in which the ball is shown bouncing around the rim in three discrete panels, two of which bear the words, “Klang!” and “THUNK” (40). Finally, Yang’s habit of peppering his comic panels with images of the scoreboard, including the time remaining in a given game, invites the readers into the gymnasium and causes them to invest themselves in the O’Dowd players as they read.
Similarly, Yang establishes an anxious atmosphere with his close-up images that feature the word “STEP” within the comic panel’s illustration. Of course, while the sound of the “step” can be assumed whenever someone is walking, Yang chooses to isolate these images to convey that the individual is perhaps walking slowly or feeling anxiety. Yang uses these close-up images in both distant historical moments, the recent past, and the present day whenever he wishes to convey the magnitude of an individual’s courage in overcoming this atmosphere of anxiety. These events include when Senda Berenson steps onto the court to introduce basketball to her women’s physical education class, when Coach Lou decides to embrace Phelps after the sexual allegation charges, and when Mr. Yang himself decides to approach Coach Lou for the first time in the O’Dowd athletic facility in pursuit of following his team.
Flashback
A flashback is when the author jumps suddenly to a different period in the past to aid in the reader’s understanding of the plot. Yang uses flashbacks often to demonstrate both trajectories of historical phenomena as well as to show in greater detail important junctures in his characters’ lives. As such, Yang uses flashbacks both to historical moments far anterior to the present as well as to living memories of his characters that feature important moments of their lives.
For example, Coach Lou flashes back to one of the final moments of his basketball career. This was important to Coach Lou because, although the game would have allowed his high school team to win the championship game, the referee charged the Dragons with goaltending, which resulted in the Dragons’ defeat during Coach Lou’s senior year. Yang depicts a high-school-aged Coach Lou in a flashback within Chapter 1 as he relives the missed opportunity—represented by the young Lou’s series of thought bubbles—in class and while playing baseball. Yang features this flashback to demonstrate the significance of this moment in making Coach Lou the person he is today.
Historical flashbacks within the narrative itself, rather than the thoughts of the characters, include Yang’s trip back to the mid-20th century to show Croatian George Mikan as he gradually found his home on the basketball court. Yang also flashes back to the unprecedented performance of Marques Haynes during the early days of the Harlem Globetrotters. The same flashback retells how Haynes’s early performance provoked the ire of his Langston University coach, who accused him of playing in a way that the coach considered fundamentally unsound. Yang uses these historical flashbacks to tell the stories of the individuals who paved the way for immigrants and African American basketball players in the present day.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is a literary technique in which the author places two things—settings, characters, or objects—side by side to highlight their differences. As Dragon Hoops is a graphic novel, Yang uses juxtaposition in both his narrative text and images. For example, Yang begins the chapter in which Yang introduces O’Dowd alumna and All-American basketball player Oderah (Chapter 6) with the story of a Russian immigrant, Senda Berenson, who had to argue to allow women to play basketball and settled for significantly modified rules such as restrictions on dribbling and running. In the same chapter, he features a full-page spread of Oderah holding a basketball against a background of stars projecting out of the page while the narrative calls her an “extraordinary athlete” (186). Also in this chapter is a full-page image of Georgeann Wells slam-dunking the basketball, explaining that she was the first female to do so (184). Yang juxtaposes Berenson with Wells and Oderah to highlight how different modern women’s basketball is from its early days.
Yang uses juxtaposition when he shows Jeevin Sandhu reciting the Mul Mantar, a Sikh prayer, in a speech bubble immediately beneath the team standing reciting a Catholic prayer (263) to represent the differences between the Catholic and Sikh faiths. In the panel in which the O’Dowd players join in a Catholic prayer, the entire team is shown standing in formation in front of the American flag, while Jeevin is shown only in close-up with his eyes closed, praying silently. Here, Yang uses juxtaposition to highlight the extent to which Catholicism is the prevailing religion.
Motif
Yang uses several motifs in his novel. One of these is the pie chart. Mr. Yang, a math teacher who moonlights as a journalist, naturally conceives of his life as a circle that is divided among his teaching career, his comic book pursuits, and time with his family. This initial image of a pie chart in the first chapter is revisited in Chapter 5 to show that comics—namely, Yang’s journalistic fandom of the O’Dowd Dragons—occupies one-third of the chart, but it used to occupy just a quarter, having subsumed a portion of his family time.
The other familiar motif is the close-up image of an individual taking a step during a fateful moment in their lives or career, such as when Yao Ming steps off a plane from China to play in the NBA (295) and, soon after, Chinese immigrant Qianjun “Alex” Zhao boards a plane to go to America to play basketball (310).
