The Brief and (Truly) Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

            In class during this past week, we were asked whether or not we thought Oscar’s life was truly “wondrous,” and, if we did think it was, what made it so.  Now that I have finished the novel and have had time to consider it at greater length, I do, indeed, think that Oscar de Léon’s life is “wondrous.”  The quote that ultimately brought me to this conclusion is at the beginning of section II, during Lola’s narration of her last few weeks in the Dominican Republic.  When her abuela informs her that it is time for her to return to New Jersey and her mother, Lola, who has thrived in her “patria,” as she later calls it, says, “That’s life for you.  All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing.  If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses.  I think there is only life.  That’s enough” (205).  This means, to me, that the simple fact of Oscar’s life is enough to make it “wondrous.”  He is in the unique position of being both different and seemingly unable to chance who he is in a culture with highly specific expectations of its male population.

            In his interview with Paul Jay, Junot Díaz describes his novel as “a book filled with characters wearing masks,” yet Oscar, as a Dominican male “loser” who fails at almost every undertaking aside from procuring, reading, and writing science fiction and fantasy novels, wears no masks – his way of wearing no masks is, essentially, to fail at any attempt he or any other character makes to change him.  In college, when Yunior sets out on his “Oscar Redemption Program,” Oscar resists until he ultimately gets into a physical confrontation with Yunior (179).  During the Paul Jay interview, Díaz talks about the idea that removing one’s last mask or layer of masks is to make one vulnerable, and Oscar is nothing if not vulnerable.  Over the course of the novel he exposes his vulnerabilities to nearly everyone.  With Yunior and Lola, it is his inability to exercise or change his personality, with his mother, it is his desire to sit inside and read instead of wander about the neighborhood with the other Dominican boys, and with women, it is his sheer desire to have a girlfriend, to be the object of female attention.  Only at the end of the novel, when it is revealed that Oscar had a relationship with Ybón before he was killed, and that what he realized that hew as truly seeking was intimacy, does the Díaz quote from the Paul Jay interview ring true:  “The access to intimacy is vulnerability.”

          The  fact that Oscar is one of the few characters without a “mask” is one of several things that makes his life “wondrous,” but it was, for me, perhaps one of the hardest to uncover, hidden as it is behind the idea that, to so many characters, Oscar is simply a loser.