Response 5

'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' offers almost no footnotes except for when it comes to history. Within this historical language, which consists of dates, names, and facts, there is also slang, science fiction references, and Spanish. I think the author largely incorporates historical footnotes to keep the reader from being too lost. The narrator also offers an explanation when he talks about how Balaguer was boiled alive and adds, “Although not essential to our tale, Balaguer is essential to the Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him” (90). Each glimmer of history is a necessary glimmer into Oscar.

The narrator may not be speaking much Spanish in the footnotes, but he speaks in the inconceivable language of brutality. On page two, the author states of Trujillo, “He was...so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.” Diaz's historical language sometimes loses me because it is rushed, like history in the form of striking lightning. Sometimes the footnotes read like a slightly more hip listing of significant of events that probably deserve more explanation than they are given and which I should look up later. It is understandably overwhelming because it was certainly overwhelming for those who lived through it.

The author seems very aware that his audience will be American, as he shows in his decision to footnote his historical language. For the first time, Diaz translates a Spanish word (pariguayo) into “party watcher”(19). The word “pariguayo” is about American marines who occupied the DR. The author writes, “Don't worry, when you have kids they won't know the US occupied Iraq either” (19). Because America's imperialistic history has often been hidden from history textbooks and by our own apathy, we need a footnote written by a Dominican about a Spanish word to explain America to Americans. The narrator conveys how sadly foreign we are to our own history, and how foreign future generations will be to our present.

At one point, Oscar is incorporated into a footnote, as though he is a part of history. On page 21 the narrator speculates, “Where this outsized love of genre jumped off from no one seems to know.” He then jumps into a number of theories, as though speaking about a legend filled with holes because it was passed down for generations. By placing Oscar in a footnote that incorporates a story-telling orator voice, the author makes an ordinary man seem as wondrous as the title implies.

In contrast with the author's agenda to transform the reader into a lost alien, his agenda to educate the reader with history initially felt odd. However, on closer examination, the author must know that history of one country will leave an outsider without the ability to completely understand another's past. In this way, I was still a lost alien. On another level, the histories also show that Oscar may not be wondrous in his life by page 170, but he certainly is wondrous simply because he managed to be alive despite the political climate of the Dominican Republic throughout history.