The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The narrator of most of the book, Yunior is a young Dominican American who operates as a foil to Oscar in many ways. Oscar is overweight, and Yunior is an accomplished weightlifter. Oscar has only kissed two girls in his life, and Yunior is an unrepentant and rapacious ladies’ man. Oscar only inspires skepticism when he says he is Dominican, while Yunior is a paragon of stereotypical Dominican masculinity.

Yunior’s masculinity is in many ways a pose that hides deep insecurities. Oscar inadvertently inflames these insecurities, as when he quits Yunior’s exercise regimen and develops a friendship with Jenni, a young woman who embarrassed Yunior by rejecting his advances. In Yunior’s adversarial framework of masculinity, these actions are viewed as personal affronts to Yunior’s manhood. Yunior’s personal hyper-masculinity also runs parallel to Trujillo’s political hyper-masculinity.

There is a key distinction between the Yunior the character and Yunior the narrator. As a character, Yunior is seen mostly in his early twenties as a deeply damaged and deeply immature young man with poor impulse control. As narrator, however, Yunior speaks as an adult who regrets many of his decisions—particularly with regard to Lola—and is now settled down with a wife. He is more like Oscar than he ever was when Oscar was alive, railing off comic book references and valuing emotional intimacy over sex.

Yunior the narrator is also a stand-in for the author, addressing the reader directly and casually. Sometimes he does so with a fair amount of detachment, casting himself as the mythical alien Uatu the Watcher from Marvel Comics. He generally adopts this pose when relating stories he heard secondhand. When he is directly involved in the narrative, Yunior’s narration is more realistic. This dualism is consistent with the observations of Latin American studies scholar Diana Pifano, who, as previously cited, writes that characters in Oscar Wao view distant historical trauma through the lens of fantasy and science fiction and firsthand trauma through the lens of realism (Pifano, Diana. “Reinterpreting the Diaspora and the Political Violence of the Trujillo Regime: The Fantastic as a Tool for Cultural Mediation in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Belphégor, 12(1). 15 Jun. 2014).  

Referred to by Yunior as “the Queen of Diaspora” (262), Belicia is the matriarch of the de León clan and perhaps the individual who suffers most as a result of the Cabral fukú. Born with much darker skin than most Dominicans, Belicia is the target of colorism from infancy, when most of her deceased mother’s relatives refuse to take her in. She is forced to live in increasingly squalid conditions until her ninth year, when her father’s cousin La Inca saves her from a foster father who permanently scars her by pouring hot oil on her back.

When Belicia goes through puberty, the changes to her body attract the attention of men, old and young. Although she recognizes this attention as a form of power, it may also be seen as an extension of the curse in that it puts her into the path of the Gangster. As a result of their tryst, Belicia’s unborn baby is killed, she is beaten beyond recognition, and she must leave the Dominican Republic and join the diaspora.

The curse, however, follows Belicia to America. Her husband and the father to her children abandons her after three years. Roughly a decade later, she is diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoes a mastectomy, losing a part of the body she is so proud of. She passes the curse along to her children, Oscar and Lola, who suffer their own traumas.

While Yunior attributes her hardship to a supernatural curse, the counterargument is that Belicia and the rest of the characters are victims of social, institutional, and political trauma. Most of this trauma stems from the Trujillo regime and the legacy of masculinity and violence that follows in his wake for generations.

Lola is Oscar’s sister and the only person other than Yunior who serves as a narrator in the book. She differs most from Yunior in that she attributes the various traumas of the de León clan to non-supernatural forces. As a rebellious teen, Lola is sent to live in Santo Domingo, where she thrives at first but soon begins to make more reckless choices. Upon being forced to return to the United States and continue her tumultuous relationship with Belicia, Lola writes, “If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough” (205).

This counter-perspective on the family curse may be due to the clearer lineage of Lola’s generational trauma compared to Oscar’s and Yunior’s. Hers is a story of young girls who never receive love during their formative years and grow up incapable of passing love to their own progeny. Due to Trujillo’s destruction of Abelard and his family, Belicia is raised by so-called “savages” for the first nine years of her life. By the time La Inca recovers her, Belicia is damaged beyond repair. With no functional mother-daughter framework to build on, Belicia then passes that trauma on to Lola by showing her zero love.

Whether the trauma is supernatural or not, at the end of the novel Lola is in a position to break that cycle of pain. If she is able to show her unnamed daughter love, despite never receiving it herself growing up, she will have broken the spell and delivered the Cabral/de León line out of fukú.

Abelard is Belicia’s father who inadvertently sets into motion the events that bring about the Cabral family fukú. Like many wealthy men during the Trujillo era, he is careful not to challenge the dictator to protect his own life and his family. Although his silence arguably makes him complicit in Trujillo-era atrocities, he does not actively collude with the dictatorship like some men—including Abelard’s father, who provided horses to Trujillo’s troops during the Parsley Massacre of 20,000 Haitians.

While Abelard is willing to look the other way when it comes to massacres, secret killings, and rigged elections, he draws the line when it comes to his daughter Jacquelyn, whose growing beauty draws the lecherous eyes of Trujillo. After refusing Trujillo’s “request” to bring Jacquelyn to a presidential event, Abelard is arrested for slander on an anonymous tip. His arrest causes a chain reaction of misfortune: First, his devastated wife, Socorro, walks into the path of an oncoming ammunition truck, dying instantly. Belicia is sent to live in abusive foster homes where she never learns how to give or accept familial love. That upbringing indirectly leads to a difficult childhood for Lola and Oscar, both of whom struggle mightily to escape the cycle of generational trauma that began with Abelard. 

La Inca, Abelard’s cousin, raises Belicia from the age of nine. In Yunior’s extended Lord of the Rings metaphor, she is likened to Galadriel, the angelic elf who initially covets the power of the One Ring before refusing it and sending Frodo away to destroy it. La Inca follows a similar arc in that she is eager to reclaim the status that comes with the Cabral name through Belicia, before acknowledging that she must abandon this ambition and send Belicia to America. The Cabral name thus becomes like the ring itself—a source of power that is nevertheless cursed.

Ybón Pimentel is a “semiretired puta” who meets Oscar on his trip to Santo Domingo. Like Ana and Jenni, she becomes an object of obsession for Oscar. Unlike Ana and Jenni, she seems to have real feelings for Oscar that go beyond friendship. Unfortunately, she also has a police capitán for a boyfriend who has Oscar beat severely when he catches him with Ybón.

Yunior admits that many readers may find the character of Ybón to be implausible. She is essentially an exoticized version of the “tart with a heart” that emerges across Western literature. However, Yunior does not care if readers find her convincing. He is the one filling the blank pages of Oscar’s forgotten life, and if he wants Oscar to fall in love with a literary trope, that’s his prerogative.