Response 5

by Alora Young

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao begins with poetic imagery that is beautiful and formal, and that creates emotion in us instantly:

“They say it came from Africa, carried on the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.”

The next paragraph, however, starts with “ain’t” and “shit” and how “Everybody knew someone who’d been eaten by a fukú”. This complete change of tone is just one demonstration of how Díaz uses language in this novel. He also commonly uses Spanish words and phrases, “big words [Oscar] had memorized only the day before” and sci-fi and comic book references, which, let’s be honest, are a language of their own too. Then there are the constant changes of tone. What we read about Oscar in Chapter One has an entirely different tone than what we read about his sister Lola in Chapter Two. Both, are again, very different from the tone we hear when learning about Oscar and Lola’s mother Beli in Chapter Three. This can be explained by the fact that each of these sections has a different person telling the story.

Oscar’s section is told from our narrator’s point of view. He achieves a somewhat informal tone, what with the swearing in both English and Spanish and all the ‘like’s and mostly casual footnotes. It’s a conversational tone that manages to stay just on the right side of charming. He makes the otherwise unlikeable Oscar likeable, poking fun at him in a way that shows he genuinely cares and worries about him, which makes us care about him. Then we move onto Lola’s story, which is written in first person. We assume that this is because Lola told our narrator the story this way, and he knew that conveying it to us the way she did to him would provoke the intended emotions. From Lola’s point of view, the swearing all but ceases to exist, while the Spanish continues to serve as a cultural reference and device in character development.

The different vernaculars used in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao not only establish character and setting and convey emotion, but they also serve the purpose of slightly alienating the reader. In an interview, Junot Díaz said that when reading this book you’re supposed to feel like an immigrant, as the characters are. It creates a connection that many people throughout the world, let alone white American readers could not find otherwise. Also, since this book is in a large part about a love of reading, Díaz commented that it highlights our ability to skip over things we don’t understand in books and just continue on, because that is a large part of reading. I think this use of language is very clever, and it has certainly given me a greater appreciation and desire to read this book through to conclusion.