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Chapter 31
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Transcendent Kingdom, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Religion
Self-Discovery, Identity, and Individuality
Addiction, Depression, and Control
Trauma, Caretaking, and Intimacy
Summary
Analysis
One of Gifty’s childhood journal entries explains that she learned at church that her friend’s mom won’t allow her to play at Gifty’s house. She told Nana, but he didn’t care.
As Nana’s addiction gradually becomes common knowledge, Gifty and her mother find their family isolated rather than supported by the community in which Nana and Gifty have lived their whole lives. Nana’s addiction insulates him from its consequences, and as a child Gifty struggles to make him understand her suffering.
Themes
Gifty recalls intuiting that addiction was contagious and shameful, so she and her mother should not talk about Nana with anyone. She didn’t talk until college when she confessed after a classmate wondered how she knew so much about heroin. The classmate was impressed that Gifty was taking her pain and turning it into helpful research.
In her childhood, Gifty learned that it was dangerous to tell people about the bad things that happened to her (specifically Nana’s addiction) because doing so isolated her and her family or, worse, made them into some sort of object lesson for others. She learned this lesson perhaps too well, leading to her adult struggle to share her thoughts and experiences with others. This revelation adds further depth to her willingness to tell Han about her brother and his death.
Themes
But Gifty doesn’t feel so noble. She remembers wishing Nana had cancer because that would have felt less shameful for her. She started researching addiction to work through her misunderstandings and shame. Because she can still look at the scans of addiction-ruined brains and still wonder why Nana couldn’t stop for her or for their mother.
Themes
After a short sobriety, Nana disappeared. Gifty imagined how tired he must have been of the pain of withdrawal, of everything. They found him in a park, spread out “like an offering.” They lifted him into the car, while Gifty tried not to cry and people looked on without helping. At home, as Nana started to wake up, their mother hit him, screaming, “This has to stop.” But she couldn’t stop hitting him and he just took it.
Themes
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