The Universal Experience of Youth as Reflected in
Junot Diaz’s “The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
“A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.”
– Charles Dickens, a British Novelist
Many elders would usually counsel young people to cherish and love what their youth brings while it is there. Once all of these experiences end, one can only go back to them through retelling and reminiscing. The experiences, adventures, endeavors, fantasies, and dreams are some of the most precious things older people reminisce about their youth. Thus, a young person’s story is also told to be the best, the richest, and the most substantial. Such story may involve vivid experiences, explorations, and discoveries, but it almost always comes with the pain of rejection, failure, or despair. Nevertheless, whatever there is about youth, it is indeed the time when the spotlight of life becomes the brightest and the colors of experiences are most alive.
One of the shortest yet most colorful stories about a young man is the story of Oscar Wao told by Junot Diaz in The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The story is set in a humble and ordinary village in Dominican Republic. The story begins with the idea that fuku exists. Fuku appears to be a curse which exists to make a person’s life miserable and bring the world in a state of turmoil. This would be later associated with how the life of the young Oscar Wao would turn out. The colorful and historic background of Dominican Republic depicts Oscar’s roots and his origins. His family became immigrants of the United States to escape the dreaded fuku inhabiting their home in San Diego as they believe that it might destroy their lives. As an immigrant, Oscar and his family suffer from the usual experiences that immigrants generally go through, particularly discrimination about their color and ethnicity. However, the challenges of being an immigrant do not stop Oscar and his younger sister, Lola from living an average and normal teenage life.
Oscar’s character and life appear to be a clear mirror of the general life of a teenager. Oscar is portrayed as a young man who goes through the same heartaches, troubles, and dilemmas that an average boy in America experiences. Diaz suggests that at Oscar’s age, infatuation may come as inexorable as love when Oscar started to fancy girls and fool around in New York City. Oscar struggles with the challenging experience of being dumped and rejected as well. Based on how Oscar dealt with it, the author implies that recovering from the first heartbreak is the most painful, difficult, and life-changing situation any guy in high school could go through. After coping with rejection and his broken heart, Oscar transforms into a young adult who strives to gain confidence and a young “romantico” who struggles to win a woman’s heart behind everyone his age who has already found himself a partner. His struggles reflect the reality that some young people indeed experience watching the colorful experience of youth pass right in front of their eyes without them being able to experience such. However, time passes by and Oscar faces more failures in love, leaving him devastated. He faces the world burdened with frustrations of not being the same as everybody of his age, who walks around with beautiful girls by his side. This aspect of Oscar’s distress tells a lot about how the youth of this generation pay importance to having partners who actually boost one’s ego and confidence. In many ways, the story illustrates the modern day’s rite of passage when it comes to young boys of Oscar’s age.
At the end of the story, Oscar explores deeper fantasies such as sex and having more intimate relationships with the opposite sex. He discovers a deeper feeling than infatuation as he grows older. Unsurprisingly, the novel also depicts an inexorable truth about young men’s fear of staying a virgin as they enter their college years. It shows that graduation from high school opens the gate of sexual activities for most guys in this generation. However, the sad truth about Oscar’s narrative is that an individual’s physical appearance certainly matters.
“Sophomore year Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood parigüayo (loser).” (excerpt from the Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz 19 )
In a nut shell, the story of Oscar Wao tells recounts the struggle of growing up while trying to fit in at the same time in a foreign land. Growing up as a man of a different ethnicity from everybody else, Oscar lived through his life burdened with a lot of expectations and prejudices from the people around him, causing him to assume an image that meets all his peers’ expectations. His world, friends, heartaches, adventures, and mishaps all molded his desire to become an “acceptable” man of his generation. Based on the novel, being acceptable in Oscar’s generation means having girlfriends, physically being fit, and not dying a virgin. This reflects similar stories and realities of what the youth of today go through as well. In this short-lived yet well retold story of Oscar Wao, the concept of youth being the most colorful and alive is further justified. Indeed, one’s dreams, fantasies, and desires have a completely different intensity during this stage of a person’s life. Regardless of ethnicity, a community’s collective awareness on beliefs, traditions, and culture shapes up norms which influence people’s expectations of others and themselves. Recalling how Oscar’s story ended, he eventually got what he wanted, even though he lost everything that is ahead of him- his future, his dreams and the possibility of finding love despite his appearance- as he died. Thus, through Oscar’s life experiences, the novel expresses that childhood is the most colorful time of life, and the ending of Oscar’s story also implies that childhood is also the stage of life that is worth passing through.
Works Cited
Diaz, Junot. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. London: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Dickens, Charles. “A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.” Quote Junkie: British Edition.
Ed. Hagopian Institute. California: CreateSpace, 2008. 16
