Final Thoughts on Oscar Wao (Part 2)

(contains spoilers)

“And the book says: We may be through with the past… but the past is not through with us!” ~ Quiz Kid Donnie Smith

I felt sorry for Oscar, but I never identified with him. It’s curious that the hero of our story is someone I didn’t feel very close to. When I read of his death in the final chapters, I shrugged my shoulders and went, meh. So I want to know why it is that I didn’t warm up to Oscar by the conclusion of the novel.

For starters, he’s overweight. And because I used to be overweight, I now dislike overweight people (it’s a self-hate type of thing, I think). And he’s a dork. He uses crazy big words, watches Akira over and over again,  and hits on uninterested girls in broad daylight. Awkward and socially inept. Yes, I thought he was pathetic.

At the same time, though, I wanted to root for him (that is slightly different from “I rooted for him”). When Yunior tries to Rocky-train his lard-ass, I wanted Oscar to succeed in losing some weight. When Oscar attempts to woo one of his female ‘prospects,’ namely Ybón, yeah, I secretly wished for him to get some tail. I wanted him to be less of a nerd (probably because I was kind of a nerd in high school)! Essentially, I didn’t identify with him; I merely quietly judged him.

This distance between me and the main character (that’s debatable, I know, so maybe I’ll change it to)—er, title character—was not a big deal. I get the feeling that Junot Díaz intended for this distance to occur. After all, we didn’t hear Oscar speak his own thoughts, like, ever (most of his segments are narrated by Yunior). Oscar is just another cog in the wheel, along with Lola, Beli, and Abelard.

In fact, it was hard for me to identify with any of the characters (maybe because I’m not Hispanic—wait, can I use that word?), including the narrator, Yunior. I loved his voice, though—the casual, urban language he used, his dumb but still insightful ruminations, his playboy attitude. Yunior proved to be such an unexpected storyteller (and that reveal was such a pleasant surprise). He claims that the entire novel is a sort of ‘zafa’—”Even as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell.” (7)—but the whole fukú business is still murky in my mind.

I first understood that fukú originated with Rafael Trujillo, but as I scan over the pages now, I’m re-learning that fukú is married to slavery. Slavery, I understand. The Jews, the Blacks, the Chinese, the Koreans, and so on…all enslaved at one time or another. It is a type of evil that acts like a thorn in a person’s ancestry, not to mention identity. And zafa, I suppose, is making peace with that part of your/your parent’s/their parents’/their parents’ past. [Please correct me if I’m wrong here.]

So we have Yunior de Las Casas narrating the story here. He is the one telling us the history of his people, in his very modern, American voice. And that makes sense to me, because he seems to be the type of character who can shut down his past and move on with his life. Go forward. Just be.

I have no doubt in my mind that Yunior is the author’s alter ego (I believe Yunior also appears in Díaz’s previous book, Drown). And though I’ve yet to see Díaz on TV or in-person or heard him on the radio, I have an inkling that he doesn’t sound at all like Yunior¹. This is just a hunch, of course, but I think the character Yunior is someone the author would want to be like: a macho, carefree, irresponsible type of fellow. Why do I think this and why is it important? I don’t know; I just think there’s something kind of artificial about Yunior.

Yunior doesn’t seem to care deeply about his past (I don’t even think he 100% buys into the idea of fukú) or where he came from (on the surface, anyway), but certainly Díaz does. But I think Díaz would like to be the type of person who would like to shed the bad luck (and by bad luck, I mean the deep scar in the Dominican Republic’s grief-filled history) associated with his heritage and just be an American, whatever that means.

Anyhow, I would like to leave Oscar Wao for now and move onto our next book, Ha Jin’s Waiting. I would like to revisit Oscar Wao, which is kind of amazing, in the future when I have time to reread it.

1. The footnotes, I’m deducing, is straight-up Junot Díaz, what with all the shout-outs (to his friends and dad) and historical information (so unlike Yunior). Furthermore, at one point, Díaz actually puts a spotlight on an image he created that is historically improbable (footnote 17).