Answer:
"A Dark Brown Dog" is an allegorical story: its characters represent groups and ideas. The dog itself represents liberated African Americans in the South, who lack the power to protect themselves from their white neighbors. The child represents an emerging movement of Southern whites sympathetic to integration and equality: still new and small relative to the other characters, and not entirely free from the violence and prejudice of their parents. The family represents older Southern traditions and practice, and the fact that they are not entirely in agreement speaks to an ongoing debate within the region. The father, the patriarch of the family, represents the most powerful and cruelest elements of the old South. The child, despite his best intentions, is too weak to defend the dog from the hatred of his family and the casual violence of his father.
These allegorical characters, depicted to be somewhat like real people, are also deeply personified. Both the dog and the child have thoughts and actions attributed to them that are adult in terms of age and out of proportion in terms of scale to the actual events. The child is described as conducting "interviews" with the dog and "going off to hobnob," and later he is referred to as a "terrible potentate," a term that would more accurately describe a cruel king than a small child. The dog, meanwhile, is described as praying, lacking confidence in the rest of the family, and being "proud to be the retainer of so great a monarch."
The juxtaposition of sophisticated, adult language for the actions of the child and the dog provides the story with an air of verbal irony, one that is matched with and played against the juxtaposition of violence with the language of entertainment in the case of the family and most especially the father. The father's drunken rampage is described as "a carnival," and his killing of the dog includes a description of him "hilariously" swinging the small animal by its leg. The contrast between the language utilized by the story and the practical realities it describes heightens the cruelty of the characters depicted.
