Yellow Dog is a title that calls the reader to imagine the question of bravery and cowardice. Because yellow is often associated with cowardly behavior, the title invites the reader to ask which characters demonstrate bravery and which demonstrate something else. When Clint Smoker kills Andrews and Simon Fingers, the reader is left with an ethical dilemma—should we celebrate the death of Andrews as a kind of outlaw justice, or should we find some broader lesson about violence, trauma, and suffering?
The truth of the matter is that life isn't kind of hard for the cast in this novel. The story is brutal to every character—from Xan, to Andrews, to Cora, to Smoker, all characters are forced into their worst nightmare. The question is where the characters worsen their fate from bad to worse. After all, Xan's aggression made him an enemy of a powerful crime lord. Andrews abandoned his son and ultimately incurred his own death. Cora tried to manipulate a hurt person and ended up horrified by his reality, and Smoker is so disturbed by Xan's reality that he murders someone in a fit of wrathful panic.
In all of these, it is violence and warfare that make their situation more difficult than it needs to be. With their poverty, the social injustices they face, the imbalance of the economy that causes communities to become desperate—with all these problems, it seems from the novel that only violence can take this difficult life and turn it into pure hell. Whenever one of the characters seeks to hurt or use another character, all hell breaks loose.
