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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Part 1
Explanation and Analysis—Bodies Dropping:
During Part 1 of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog orates Lan's story for the reader. He recalls that Lan, faced with limited job opportunities and a child to care for, took up sex work as a means of providing for herself and her dependents. Much of this sex work serviced American soldiers. In the following excerpt, Little Dog visualizes this wartime sex work through the use of imagery and simile:
Leaving Mai in the care of her sister back in the village, Lan rented a windowless room from a fisherman by the river, where she took the soldiers. How the fisherman, living below her, would spy on her through a slot in the wall. How the soldiers’ boots were so heavy, when they kicked them off as they climbed into bed, the thumps sounded like bodies dropping, making her flinch under their searching hands.
As these soldiers shed their clothes, the narrative presents an auditory image through simile: the soldier's boots sound like "bodies dropping." Cleverly, this simile relates American soldiers' power over Vietnamese bodies on the battlefield to the sexual power soldiers exert over Lan. Combining simile and imagery, Vuong succinctly demonstrates how wartime violence and a sense of unequal sexual power can be interrelated.
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Explanation and Analysis—Debris:
Throughout the novel, Little Dog draws on his knowledge of monarch butterflies to construct an elaborate web of figurative language. He connects his family's experiences with war, trauma, and diaspora to the movement and migration of butterflies, crafting stark, distinctive imagery. One notable instance of this figurative language arises in Part 1, taking the form of a simile:
Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.
Little Dog compares monarch butterfly wings to the debris of a huge explosion, scattered into the wind. In this passage, monarchs represent Vietnamese victims of diaspora, forced to migrate from their home by napalm and violence, blown askew in all directions like bomb fragments. Both monarch butterflies and Vietnamese people have been "blowing, for thousands of miles across the sea" to other countries, driven from their homes by warfare. These butterflies, like Little Dog himself, can "no longer fathom the explosion they came from," as such traumatic memories degrade with time and by necessity—the mind's own mechanism for self-preservation.
Related Themes:
Part 3
Explanation and Analysis—Bandages:
During Part 3, Little Dog mourns Trevor's death by remembering the intimate moments they once shared, beautiful despite awkwardness and imperfection. Little Dog uses both imagery and simile in the following excerpt as a means of conveying such nuanced intimacy:
The air, close and thick from the summer’s last heat, whistled low through the barn. I pressed myself into his sunbaked skin, still warm from the day in the field. His teeth, ivory and unrotted, nibbled my chest, nipples, stomach. And I let him. Because nothing could be taken from me, I thought, if I had already given it away. Our clothes fell off us like bandages.
Little Dog describes an intimate moment with Trevor, fixating on a sensory bouquet of physical touch. Touch is both a healing and a wounding force in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Vuong alludes to this in his choice of simile, following a description of sensual intimacy: "our clothes fell off us like bandages." As Trevor and Little Dog bare themselves to one another, they also reveal hidden wounds. Each of them trusts the other to leverage touch as a form of healing rather than as a vessel for violence; simultaneously, both Trevor and Little Dog bear witness to one another's wounding through touch.
Related Themes:
