Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead

Emily Austin

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Animals

Gilda often positions herself as a detached biologist observing human behavior. She expresses her detachment from herself and others through similes and metaphors that compare people and their attributes to animals. Gilda calls her heart a “bird on fire” that tries to escape her ribcage to communicate how her panic attacks feel (29). She observes nurses working in the hospital as if they are birds building nests or “deer in a meadow” (67). These similes and metaphors of animal-like behavior allow Gilda to distance herself from human activities. Simultaneously, her comparison of humans to other animals allows her to marvel at human behavior. She thinks the human abilities to tend to others in illness and attend concerts are staggering because other animals don’t do them.

Gilda indirectly reminds readers that we ourselves are animals. While this initially fuels her pessimism over the meaninglessness of life, the mere existence of animals ultimately allows her to find value in life. In the final scene of the novel, Gilda gushes to Eleanor about the wondrous qualities of dandelions, pigs, and apes. She believes if humans had found these forms of life on any other planet, they would think them “the most remarkable, precious aliens” (227). This sentiment extends to humankind as well, due to Gilda’s equation of humans to animals: If other animals existing is remarkable and precious, so, too, is the existence of humans.

Pets

While pets are animals, their symbolism in Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead operates differently. Pets are animals brought into the home and often treated like beloved family members. Several pets appear throughout the novel: Gilda’s childhood rabbit Flop, Rosemary’s cat Lou, an unnamed housecat seen through a window, and Mittens, the cat missing from Gilda’s neighbor’s house after a housefire. Contemplating the unnamed housecat, Gilda thinks “I matter as much as this cat does. Worse than that, everyone around me matters as much as this cat does. […] I think this cat should be considered incredibly important (119). Pets often live shorter lives than their human families, but for Gilda, they matter just as much as any human. They mirror Gilda’s paradoxical view of life: They matter so little in the grand scheme of the universe, yet are incredibly important to people.

Flop the rabbit is Gilda’s first and last pet. Gilda only had Flop for two years before suddenly finding the rabbit dead (8). This sudden death teaches Gilda about the fleeting nature of life. Flop mattered, and continues to matter, as much as the unnamed housecat in the window. Eli gives Gilda a painting of Flop for her 28th birthday, indicating that the rabbit still matters to her 18 years later. Gilda’s fixation symbolizes her existential struggle: She values the lives of pets and spends most of her evenings after work searching for Mittens until she wears herself out. The sudden appearance of Mittens at the end of the novel juxtaposes with Flop’s death. Where Flop died without warning, Mittens is found alive when Gilda was convinced the cat was dead. Gilda’s dedication to finding Mittens represents her belief that others (including pets) are important, even if the universe remains indifferent. Pets are emblematic of the human need to find meaning in life and persistence through meaninglessness.

Catholic Imagery

The novel itself is structured around the events of the Catholic liturgical calendar, reflecting Catholicism’s effect on Gilda’s life when she begins working at Saint Rigobert’s Catholic church. Catholicism offers potential answers to Gilda’s problems. Throughout the novel, the religion tackles issues of birth and baptism (58-61), death and grieving (76, 173), and partnerships (117). However, Catholic forms of comfort are ones often barred from Gilda because she’s a lesbian. Gilda believes Catholicism “makes us feel like our lives have some diving meaning; it helps us feel happy,” and finds it ironic that she’s barred from this belief system because of her LGBTQ+ identity—which is “one of the few things that makes [her] feel like [her] life is worth living at all” (161). In other words, Gilda sees Catholicism as designed to comfort people who are anxious about the meaninglessness of life, like herself.

The death-centered imagery of Catholicism reinforces Gilda’s view. When Gilda first meets Jeff, she sees that his office is covered in crosses and cross paraphernalia. She imagines a world where Jesus had been killed with a noose or guillotine, and what Jeff’s office would look like covered in these murder devices (27). Gilda sees Catholicism as a belief system adorned with imagery of death, suffering, and torture. This imagery suggests that preoccupation with death is not unique to Gilda, as humans often wrestle with their own inevitable ends. But again, Gilda doesn’t feel comfortable sharing this universal fear and possibly working through it because of biases against LGBTQ+ people. Overall, the novel’s Catholic imagery is a reminder of the human preoccupation with death and an ironic symbol of Gilda’s ostracization from the Christian community.