The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz (2007)
“A Dominican-American geek tries to get laid and find love while an ancient family curse, a brutal dictatorship, and the entire weight of diaspora history conspire to destroy him.”
Character Analysis
The novel's heart and its mystery — a Dominican-American nerd who cannot perform the masculinity his culture demands, loves with catastrophic intensity, and is destroyed for it. Oscar is not a failure; he is a person shaped by love in a world that values pride, and the collision is fatal. His nickname 'Oscar Wao' is a corruption of 'Oscar Wilde' — a gay Irish playwright whom Oscar resembles in his wit, his romantic suffering, and his ultimate martyrdom to a culture that couldn't contain him.
His dialogue is marked by sci-fi and fantasy references that his Dominican family and community cannot parse. He uses genre language to describe emotional states.