Gaps in Oscar Wao

            One of the aspects of Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that struck me the most was the seemingly random interruption of Yunior’s narration with blanks, as evident on page 329 when he says that Lola’s daughter could have been his, “if [he’d] been -------.” In pondering why this technique is used so frequently, it occurred to me that the novel is full of these “blanks,” including in its description of Trujillo’s dictatorship.
            Trujillo, as Yunior describes it, is a dictator so merciless and violent that he imprisons and tortures people for simply mispronouncing his name (214), and who is known for “the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region” (224). He pulls whomever he pleases away from their families with no reason given, while also managing to hide this from the rest of the world behind “the Plátano curtain” (225). When any incriminating evidence about him is published, Trujillo obliterates it, as is the case with Abelard’s manuscript about Trujillo’s supernatural powers (245). Trujillo’s regime has a knack for erasing years worth of information, as well as whole lives, leaving “blanks” in storylines for family members to ponder for years to come.
            Seemingly mirroring Trujillo’s ability to hide details are the aforementioned dashes in the text. For instance, after Oscar is nearly beaten to death on a trip to the DR by a corrupt policeman’s lackeys, a mongoose appears in a dream and asks if Oscar would like to live “more or less” (301). When Oscar replies that he would like “more” out of life, the mongoose’s response is obscured by dashes—“---- ---- ----” is all we see (301). The mongoose is seen in other parts of the novel as the savior of the de Leon family (151), but what it says to Oscar that motivates him to return to the Dominican Republic and ultimately get killed is unknown. In his way of using these dashes, Yunior is a bit like Trujillo: he obscures information about characters that leave holes in the ideas of readers and gaps in the memories of families. However, given that the post-dictatorship Dominican Republic and diaspora is made up of “ten million Trujillos” (324) and that the men of the novel are known to display hyper-masculine, Trujillo-like characteristics, the gaps Yunior creates are not all that surprising.