The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Through his narrator, Yunior, Díaz litters his prose with Dominican slang, Spanish neologisms of the author’s own design, and countless references to comic books, fantasy, and science fiction—in short, what would come to be termed “geek culture” or “nerd culture” in the early 2000s. According to The Annotated Oscar Wao website, there are over 130 Spanish language, terms, neologisms, and pop culture references in Chapter 1 alone (The Annotated Oscar Wao. www.annotated-oscar-wao.com). These range from Spanish phrases with no precise translation—like “dale un galletazo” (14), which literally means “give a cookie,” but which in context reads more like “slap the girl with the back of your hand”—to references to comic books that are relatively obscure to mainstream audiences, like Gordon Rennie’s White Trash: Moronic Inferno.

Some readers may view the reference-heavy prose as little more than winking to audiences, as Díaz proves his Dominican and nerdboy bonafides. However, particularly with the Spanish phrases, the language gives Yunior an authentic voice that captures the dialect of the Dominican diaspora. Moreover, the incorporation of nerd culture into this dialect captures the code-switching world Oscar inhabits, wherein he spends all day at school and at the dinner table surrounded by Dominican Americans before retreating into his world of fantasy/science-fiction cinema, literature, and role-playing at night. In the late 1980s, when Oscar’s narrative begins, The Lord of the Rings and Marvel Comics had not yet been adapted into billion-dollar film franchises nor suffused into mainstream culture. Thus, these references brand Oscar as an outsider, especially in the context of Dominican culture but also in the broader American culture at that time.

This outsider status is apparent throughout high school, but it is especially painful for Oscar when he reaches college, where he expected to finally find a circle of friends who understand him. The White kids, whom he hopes will be less likely to judge him for his nerdy tastes, treat him with “inhuman cheeriness.” Meanwhile, Yunior says, “The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You're not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, but I am. Soy Dominicano. Dominicano soy” (49).

In an interview with author Edwidge Dandicat, Díaz described the inspiration for Oscar and how Oscar relates to his own identity and upbringing:

Oscar was a composite of all the nerds that I grew up with who didn't have that special reservoir of masculine privilege. Oscar was who I would have been if it had not been for my father or my brother or my own willingness to fight or my own inability to fit into any category easily. (Dandicat, Edwidge. “Junot Díaz.” Bomb Magazine. Fall 2007.)

This idea of “masculine privilege” is explored in greater detail later in the book, when Oscar and Yunior finally meet and their separate understandings of Dominican male identity collide.

Oscar’s dual identities also reflect a broader dichotomy felt by members of modern diasporas: the blurred division between the Old Country and the New Country. In a world where an immigrant’s country-of-origin is only a plane ride away, the old traditions—and, in Yunior’s telling, the old curses—remain. In his review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Nation’s William Deresiewicz writes that for Caribbean immigrants of the late 20th century, “[a]ssimilation is less certain, involvement with the homeland more intimate and more fraught. [...] [F]amilies can remain suspended between two places, two languages and the claims of two discordant histories.” (Deresiewicz, William. “Fukú Americanus.” The Nation. 26 Nov. 2007.)

Díaz also employs many elements of metafiction in the work, reflecting the influence of other major novels of the preceding 10 years, particularly David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This influence is most noticeable in the dozens of footnotes Díaz includes in the text. These are opportunities for Yunior to temporarily hit pause on the narrative and to talk to the reader directly, often about authorial decisions pertaining to the text itself. Later on, for example, Yunior frequently preempts potential objections from Dominican readers whenever his narrative threatens to become too sentimental or his characters too stereotypical.

This explicit recognition of authorship, combined with the authenticity of the book’s narrative voice, sometimes gives the impression that Díaz/Yunior is telling the story as he would to a friend in a casual setting. In other moments, as in the Introduction and especially in Chapter 3, Yunior characterizes himself as “your humble Watcher” (4), a reference to a race of fictional aliens from The Fantastic Four who watch over the multiverse but are prohibited from interfering. This characterization echoes Yunior’s later actions with respect to Oscar, in that his efforts to help Oscar are often half-hearted and ineffective.

Finally, the author introduces the book’s central moral cosmology with the concepts of fukú and zafa. While Díaz hardly invented Caribbean folk tales or the idea that Christopher Columbus and other Europeans brought a curse on the region, the exact terms “fukú” and “zafa”—at least with respect to Dominican culture—appear to be his own creations. While the generational trauma passed on since 1492 is very palpable and real, by naming it and giving it a supernatural origin, Díaz frames his narrative as the kind of Manichaean struggle between good and evil found in Oscar’s comic books. Viewing racism, oppression, and hardship through this lens is a comfort to Oscar; if the source of one’s pain is supernatural, then there must be an equal and opposite supernatural force capable of wiping that pain away. However, particularly in the chapters that focus on Lola and Belicia, Díaz will actively undercut the notion that mystical forces are to blame for most hardship, when in fact trauma is rooted in complex sociopolitical dynamics and human behavior.