On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Mental Illness

Rose and Lan both exhibit symptoms of mental illness and post-traumatic stress disorder. Little Dog notes that Lan’s schizophrenia worsened since the Vietnam War, and she seemed to “flicker before [him], dipping in and out of sense” (16). For Example, in Part 1 Section 2, fireworks trigger Lan’s PTSD. Little Dog recalls her desperately explaining to him how he must keep quiet to avoid the mortar shells, holding him protectively until she fell asleep.

However, if Lan is often incoherent, she is just as often Lucid. While the PTSD she developed from the war causes her to be sensitive to certain stimuli, the violence Lan witnessed has also hardened her. Little Dog recalls her being unphased by a nearby shooting. Lan merely says, “In the war, entire villages would go up before you know where your balls were” (21). Additionally, she is aware of her mental illness, and she is aware that Rose suffers similarly. She tells Little Dog that “She love you, Little Dog. But she sick. Sick like me. In the brains” (122). It is a rare moment in the novel of someone other than Little Dog acknowledging mental illness in a character.

In a particularly disturbing and potentially dangerous scene, Rose forgets that her sister Mai moved away years ago and drags Lan and Little Dog along in the middle of the night to confront her abusive husband, only to be chased off by the new owner of the property and his shotgun. Rose’s quickness to action in this instance may be due to her own PTSD, as well as her delusion. Rose’s unnamed husband, Little Dog’s father, abused her. Rose, in turn, repeats the cycle of violence by frequently abusing Little Dog as he grew up. The abuse causes Little Dog to develop a warped view of love and intimacy, where closeness with another person is rooted in abuse and pain, as he notes in his sexual interactions with Trevor.

Drug Abuse

Little Dog grows up in a depressed area of Hartford, Connecticut, a part of the United States deeply impacted by the opioid epidemic. If the Vietnam War forged Little Dog’s roots, the “drug war” he and his friends faced helped forge his identity as a person and a writer. Most notably, Trevor dies of an overdose on a mixture of heroin and fentanyl, a potent, heroin-like opiate, often doctor-prescribed. Little Dog also lost five other friends, four to overdose, one to a car wreck brought on by fentanyl.

OxyContin was “first mass-produced by Purdue Pharma in 1996” and is “essentially […] heroin in a pill form” (175). Little Dog explains that “OxyContin, along with its generic forms, was soon prescribed for all bodily pain” (178). Perdue ran a campaign trying to convince the public that OxyContin was harmless; this contributed to its over-prescription. Trevor, like many people who spiraled into opioid addiction, first received a prescription from a doctor. Rather than suffering the effects of withdrawal, Trevor substituted heroin for OxyContin, eventually moving onto fentanyl, a narcotic 100 times stronger than morphine. Trevor overdoses several times during the years he and Little Dog were together.

The Survival of Beauty through Loss and Violence

The novel’s title, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, suggests the central theme of the novel. The epigraph Phuong selected from Taiwanese LGBT author Qiu Miaojin reads, “But let me see if—using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone—I can build you a center” (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous epigraph). This frames the novel as Little Dog’s attempt to establish a center—a solid base—in an otherwise uncertain existence using his words.

Little Dog views language as a way to find freedom; however, he views freedom as “nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey” (4). It is always something tenuous and fleeting. In Little Dog’s life, many of the things that have been constant are negative: trauma, loss, mental illness, and drug abuse. Because the plot of the novel is purposefully nonlinear, it shifts the focus from the sequence of events to the progression of Little Dog’s understanding of them. In a sense, he is looking for that space between the predatorial past, before it eats up its prey, and the future.

By the end of the novel, Little Dog has found his grounding, coming to terms with the trauma of his past and the loss of Trevor and Lan. Little Dog considers how “some things are hunted because they are beautiful” as he watches a sunset—reminiscent of Trevor’s comment about how Cleopatra viewed similar sunsets (238). This causes him to link the finite nature of life to beauty: he writes, “To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted” (238).

In the opening scene of the novel, Little Dog recalls his mother being disturbed by a taxidermy deer head—something that was hunted and preserved for its beauty. The final scene has Rose comparing herself to a monkey, because “Some monkeys are so fast, they’re more like ghosts, you know? They just—poof … disappear” (242). The final image is of Rose laughing. Little Dog has found his center in his mother. By fixing her beauty in place, preserving it in his letter, he has reconciled himself to the complications of his family. Though beauty is brief, he has at least managed to preserve his mother’s beautiful side.