Yunior and the de Léons

Yunior, while being an obvious embodiment of Junot Díaz in the fictional world of the de Léons, plays an interesting role in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. For all his descriptions of Oscar (as honest as they might be) as a nerd, an obese loser, and a hopeless lover, Yunior is a little bit of a nerd and a loser himself. He makes science fiction and anime references throughout his entire narration, and although he ridicules Oscar for his obsession with those kinds of movies, he is familiar with them and sits down and tries to watch them himself. He also refers to Oscar as a pariguayo, or "party-watcher", a derogatory term for someone who stays at the outskirts of social situations and watches rather than participating, yet he refers to himself as The Watcher, a comparison to the Marvel comic character (another example of his inner nerd), and sits back, observing and describing the lives of an entire family separate from his own, just as a pariguayo would do.

While he is rather blatantly a closet nerd, Yunior is a little more subtly a loser. Given, he seems to have no trouble finding women who will sleep with him, which is an easy defense against any loser accusations, but toward the end of the novel, like Oscar, he has nothing.  Even when a good thing like Lola walks into his life he finds a way to screw up with her and is left alone, wishing he could have made it work with the girl he loved most as he watches her marry someone else and have that man's daughter. He loses all that he has: a loser in the most literal sense. While there is redemption for him (just as there is for Oscar with his sexual encounter), he teaches and writes proficiently and is happy where he is in life, he understands what he lost and remains fixated on it for the remainder of that life. His narration is insightful, sincere, and easy to read and relate to, but he fills the pages with evidence of his own nerd- and loserdom, even if he would assert otherwise.