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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Emperor of Gladness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Found Family
Time
War and Generational Trauma
Distortions of Reality
The American Dream
Summary
Analysis
An omniscient narrator begins, “The hardest thing is to live only once.” They go on to describe a town in Connecticut: East Gladness, which they often refer to as “our town.” It is a beautiful place where cherry blossoms bloom in the spring and where geese fly over in the summertime. The backroads are riddled with potholes, and deteriorating school buses litter the junkyard. There are dive bars, a house that has been half-painted for seven years, and a library that was once an armory. A graffitied freighter bridge is the only way out of town, and a boy in a UPS jacket crosses that bridge on September 15, 2009. As the narrator says, “He had not been forgiven and neither are you.” The boy steps over the railing and, “like a good son,” decides to jump.
The Emperor of Gladness’s opening chapter is narrated by an unidentified voice and, at this point, discusses only the town of East Gladness rather than any characters. Additionally, in using the collective pronoun “our,” the narrator speaks for a large group, likely the broader population of East Gladness, though it is never specified. In focusing only on the novel’s setting and treating its inhabitants as a collective group, Vuong highlights the importance of East Gladness for the novel and implies a sense of community among those who live there. When the narrator’s attention finally turns to a character, he is unnamed and only distinguished by his UPS jacket. In this way, Vuong creates an almost fairytale tone, as unnamed characters are common in such stories. The narrator then goes on to address the audience directly, saying that readers haven’t been forgiven; this is once again ambiguous, as it does not specify why readers (or the boy) need to be forgiven or by whom, creating a sense of tension. The chapter’s ending raises this tension even further, as readers are left thinking the only character they have met is going to commit suicide.
Themes
