The author of the story is Junot Diaz. The setting of the story is in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. The novel begins with the narrator’s description of the curse, called fukú americanus—a curse of doom, specifically that of the New World. It was brought over to the islands of Antilles when the Europeans came and has stayed ever since. The narrator makes the claim that the late dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, has a close connection with fukú. The narrator informs the reader that he will be telling us the story of Oscar de León, who was the victim of his family’s fukú. The only known way to counteract a fukú is to use the term zafa” to ward off the curse.
The narrator then wonders if writing this book is his way of saying a zafa. The first chapter takes place in Paterson, New Jersey from 1974 to 1987 and details Oscar’s childhood and adolescence. When Oscar is seven years old, he dates two girls, Maritza and Olga, at the same time for one week. However, the threesome soon falls apart, and Oscar’s life goes downhill from then on. In adolescence, he is fat, dorky, and unattractive. Oscar’s interest in Genre makes him even more undesirable, and his only friends are Al and Miggs.
Oscar’s tío Rudolfo and sister Lola both try to encourage him to lose weight and be more masculine so that he can land a girlfriend or a lay, but Oscar does not heed their advice. When Al and Miggs find girlfriends and purposely leave him out, Oscar realizes that even they think he is a loser. Oscar visits his Nena Inca in Santo Domingo and turns to writing science fiction as an outlet. When he returns, he meets a girl named Ana Obregón at his SAT prep class and falls in love with her. Ana and Oscar become good friends but are never physically intimate.
Eventually, Ana’s boyfriend Manny returns from the army, and Ana stops spending time with Oscar. Soon after, Oscar goes to college at Rutgers. Oscar hopes life in college will be different, but while there, he realizes that he is still a loser. The second chapter takes place in the years 1982-1985 and starts in Paterson, New Jersey. Lola narrates in the first person and describes the day that Belicia (her mother) calls her into the bathroom to help her examine a lump that she has found in one of her large breasts. Lola gets a bruja, or witch, feeling that something is about to change.
After Belicia is diagnosed with cancer, Lola feels that she has less power over her. At fourteen, Lola cuts all of her hair off in an act of defiance against her mother. A major turning point in their relationship occurs when Lola slaps away Belicia’s hand when she is about to hit her. Soon after, Lola runs away to live with a boy named Aldo on the shore in Wildwood, New Jersey. Lola loses her virginity to Aldo. Their relationship is rocky, and Aldo’s father is not much better to live with than Lola’s mother was.
Lola gets lonely and calls Oscar. She asks him to meet her at a coffee shop on the boardwalk. When Oscar shows up, he brings their aunt, uncle, and mother. Lola then must live in Santo Domingo with her Nena Inca. There, Lola attends high school, joins the track team, and makes friends. She also dates a boy named Max Sánchez. Lola’s bruja feeling comes back, and she realizes that the relief from the feeling comes from the stories that La Inca tells her about her family’s past. The third chapter takes place in Santo Domingo in 1955-1962, when Belicia lives with La Inca and comes of age.
The narrator begins the story right after Beli moves in with La Inca. He notes that prior to this, Belicia had lived an awful life with an adoptive family that mistreated her. Beli attends the private, elite school El Redentor, but she makes no friends and invokes fear in others because of her volatile attitude – a toughness she adopted from her rough upbringing. When Beli hits puberty, she develops large, attractive breasts, and men start to express their desire for her. Beli then pursues her longtime crush, Jack Pujols, who is the most handsome boy at school. Soon, they are having sex in the broom closet. While Beli thinks that Pujols loves her and wants to marry her, in reality, Pujols is already promised to a wealthy girl.
When they are caught, Pujols is punished and sent away to the army. Beli is heartbroken. Beli then gets a job as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant called Palacio Peking. Belicia attracts two suitors during this time, but does not sleep with either of them. Then Belicia meets the Gangster, an older man who has a direct affiliation with Trujillo. Beli falls in love and ends up pregnant with the Gangster’s child. The Gangster is married to Trujillo’s sister, who takes revenge on Beli by having her beaten and causing her to miscarry. She is left for dead in a cane field, but a Mongoose with lion eyes appears and leads her out of the field.
Beli then leaves the country to live in New York City, and on the plane ride there, she meets the man who will become Oscar and Lola’s father. Chapter Four takes place at Rutgers University, where Oscar attends college from 1988 to 1992. Yunior starts the chapter by detailing how he got involved with the de Leóns when Lola takes care of him after he is jumped and beaten up.
Lola is worried about Oscar because he tried to commit suicide at the end of the previous year. Yunior agrees to live with Oscar in the artsy dorm Demarest. Oscar and Yunior are unlikely friends, but they get along. When Yunior’s girlfriend dumps him because of his infidelity, Yunior decides to put his extra time and energy into shaping Oscar up so he can have a better chance at getting a girl. However, Oscar loses interest partway through, and Yunior gets angry with him. Then Oscar falls in love with a Puerto Rican goth girl named Jenni Muñoz. They spend a lot of time talking but are never physically intimate.
Jenni stops hanging out with Oscar when she finds a boyfriend, and Oscar acts out by tearing things off her wall and yelling at her. Soon after, he tries to commit suicide by jumping off a train bridge in New Brunswick. Before he jumps, he sees the Golden Mongoose, and he survives the fall because he lands on the median.
Oscar lives by himself for the fall semester of the next year, but then Yunior ends up in a relationship with Lola and moves back in with Oscar for the spring. In the beginning of Section II, Lola talks about her last days in Santo Domingo with La Inca before she has to return home. Lola breaks contact with all friends and makes $2000 by sleeping with an older man. She then gives the $2000 to Max’s family when he dies in a jaywalking accident. Chapter five gives the details of Abelard Luis Cabral’s story, Belicia’s father, and Oscar and Lola’s grandfather.
He is a successful doctor who is married to a nurse, and together they have two daughters. They live an affluent lifestyle and often socialize in the same circle as Trujillo. Their oldest daughter, Jacquelyn, develops into a beautiful woman, and Abelard begins to fear that Trujillo will want to sleep with her, as he is known to do. Abelard consults his wife, Socorro, his mistress Lydia, and his friend Marcus, who all give their own opinions on the subject, but Abelard takes no action. When Abelard is asked pointedly to take Jacquelyn to a party, he chooses not to obey the order. Soon after, Abelard is arrested for a Bad Thing” he said about Trujillo.
The actual reason for his arrest is unclear. It could have been about his refusal to let Trujillo have his daughter or about a book he wrote that claimed Trujillo has supernatural powers. Abelard is sentenced to 18 years in prison. Socorro then finds out she is pregnant with their third daughter, Belicia.
After Belicia is born, Socorro dies in an accident. Belicia is then adopted by Socorro’s relatives but is later passed on to another family to be their slave. Abelard’s other two daughters die in mysterious ways, and Abelard dies during his imprisonment. Eventually, La Inca rescues Beli, finding her in a chicken coop with a terrible burn on her back. La Inca brings her to Baní, nurses her back to health, and civilizes her.
Chapter Six takes place in the years after Oscar graduates from college, from 1992 to 1995. Oscar returns to Paterson, New Jersey, and lives with his mother. He gets a job teaching at his old high school, Don Bosco Tech, where he meets another teacher named Nataly. They become friends, but he fantasizes about her, and she eventually moves away.
Oscar is very unhappy and depressed. After three years of this, he decides that he will go to Santo Domingo with his mother, tío, and sister one summer. The de Leóns go and stay with La Inca in La Capital, where she now lives. Oscar has not been there in years and has forgotten how much he loves it. He especially loves how beautiful the women are. He decides to stay for an extra month. During that month, he falls in love with a semiretired prostitute named Ybón. He becomes good friends with Ybón, but like his other relationships, they are not physically intimate.
Ybón has a boyfriend, the capitán, who is in the national police force. One night, when Oscar is driving them home from a bar, Ybón’s boyfriend pulls them over. As soon as they are pulled over, Ybón jumps on Oscar and gives him his first kiss, which is witnessed by her boyfriend. Oscar is taken to a cane field and beaten, but he survives. Ybón is also beaten, and she comes to visit Oscar to let him know she will be marrying her boyfriend. Oscar’s mother books a flight for him to leave Santo Domingo. When Oscar returns to New Jersey, he goes to visit Yunior in Washington Heights and borrows money from him. Oscar uses the money to fly back to the Dominican Republic and pursue Ybón.
Oscar spent twenty-seven days there in pursuit and also researched and wrote a manuscript. At the end of the twenty-seven days, two men who worked closely with the capitán took Oscar to a cane field and shot him. After Oscar’s death, Yunior and Lola broke up. A year later, Belicia died of cancer. Yunior describes his life in Perth Amboy, where he is married and teaches creative writing. He says he still occasionally sees Lola, who is also married and has a daughter named Isis. Yunior hopes to tell Isis all about the history of her family and show her all of Oscar’s books and manuscripts. Eight months after Oscar’s death, Lola received a package containing two manuscripts.
One has a few chapters from a space opera that Oscar was writing. The other is a letter to Lola in which Oscar says there will be another manuscript coming in the mail that will contain some sort of cure, perhaps for the fukú. However, the manuscript never arrives. Oscar also reveals that he was able to go on a trip alone with Ybón, where he had sex with her and enjoyed the intimacies of a romantic relationship.
The individual and the nation.
The novel focuses on the viewpoint of the diaspora from the Dominican Republic. Yunior, the narrator, provides the eyes through which the readers see. His narration is a mix of United States popular culture and Dominican history. For Yunior, the two are intertwined. Although the characters living in the United States are physically separated from their country of origin, they still feel a strong connection to it. The nation is sometimes represented in the individual; the epigraph emphasizes this with Derrick Walcott’s words, “Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”
The importance of the individual is stressed as well. Some of the characters’ lives (Belicia, Abelard, La Inca) operate within Trujillo’s regime, parallel with it and usually involved in it, politically, romantically, or sexually. Even Oscar becomes involved in the personal life of a member of the Policía Nacional and is thus symbolically involved with the state, much the same way that his mother and his grandfather were involved. The individual and the nation can also be looked at as the quotidian versus the official.
The prescribed content of the novel is the daily lives of the characters with a focus on their love lives. However, the undercurrent of the novel is the role that the official/state plays in the characters’ lives via political control, as well as supernatural influence.
The Outsider/The Immigrant
Oscar is the outsider in the novel mostly due to his nerdiness, intelligence, and grotesque physical appearance. Like the theme of the individual and the nation, Oscar, as the outsider, parallels the immigrant as the outsider. An immigrant is an outsider of their own country as well as in the new country. They are no longer in their country, yet they are also not a part of the new country. In the story, the matriarch Belicia is the immigrant that bridges the Dominican Republic with the United States in the novel. However, her children feel the effect of the diasporic movement as well. Belicia, Oscar, and Lola all seem to be on a quest to find where they belong.
Dominican masculinity.
Díaz emphasizes sex as a key ingredient in being a Dominican male. The Dominican male is characterized as having power and charm, and being physically attractive, sexually active, and violent. Oscar’s lack of G” is central to the novel. His goal throughout the novel is to have a woman return his affection. Oscar also lacks the ability and the desire to fight or commit violence of any nature.
Without the necessary masculinity, Oscar fails to reach his goal of finding requited love until the end of the novel. On the other hand, Yunior is the epitome of Dominican masculinity: he is muscular and sexual, and is always sleeping with more than one girl at any given time.
Tío Rudolfo also embodies the masculinity that Oscar seems to lack, and both Yunior and Rudolfo attempt to give Oscar pointers on how to have more G” and attract more women. However, Oscar fails to heed their advice.
Feminine Sexuality and Power
Both Belicia and Lola are portrayed as sexually desirable in the novel. Their sexuality is a form of power for them. Belicia’s power is emphasized by her breasts, which are reportedly 35DDDs and described in hyperbolic terms. The onset of puberty and becoming a woman marked the beginning of Beli’s power. She realized she could control men with her sexuality. However, she soon realized that the control was only to a certain extent. Beli falls in love three times but never remains in a lasting relationship.
Lola’s legs and hips are the source of her power. Reportedly, she can stop traffic when she wears shorts. When Yunior describes Lola, he usually focuses on the amount of leg she has showing or her butt, often using hyperbolic descriptions. Lola recognizes her power and uses it in a more directed fashion than Beli. While Beli used her physical attractiveness to seek love, Lola uses hers to seek escape.
Silence/Páginas en blanco
On many occasions, the narrator points out that there are gaps in the story, or what he refers to as páginas en blanco” (blank pages). There are a few reasons for these literary silences. One is to let the reader figure out their own interpretation of the story. Another is that the Trujillo dictatorship did not allow for record-keeping. Also, the voluntary amnesia of the characters allows them not to feel the pain caused by death and loss. By writing this book, the narrator attempts to fill the “páginas en blanco” that Oscar left in his death and the silences that were left in the story of the fukú of the Cabral de Leóns.
Also, both Abelard’s and Oscar’s manuscripts go missing after their deaths, leaving silences. Díaz uses dashes in place of words to emphasize blank space and missing words. The image of the blank page also appears in the last section of the book when Oscar dreams of a man holding a blank book. In the end, Yunior has a similar dream of Oscar holding a blank book, and it is this dream that eventually prompts him to write down Oscar’s story.
Love and Violence
In Oscar Wao, love often has a direct connection to violence. This theme ranges from domestic violence to extreme, gut-wrenching violence that occurs as retaliation for loving too much and/or loving the wrong person. Beli experiences the violence when she loves the Gangster, Oscar experiences it when he loves Ybón, and Abelard experiences it when he protects his daughter out of love. Lola has a different experience of love and violence—she cannot separate her mother’s love from her mother’s violent behavior towards her. Love is a strong emotion in the novel, and it is countered by anger and revenge that fuel violence. The author leads us to question which is more powerful. Both serve as fuel that keeps the characters going; both anger and love influence the rash decisions the characters make.
The Supernatural and Genre Fiction
The novel is infused with a variety of supernatural elements. The most obvious is a fukú that provides the undercurrent for the entire narrative, leading the reader to wonder if the events are all a result of the fukú. Another supernatural element in the book is the mongoose that appears to both Belicia and Oscar in their time of need. The power of La Inca’s prayer to save her daughter is portrayed as a force beyond the natural. Trujillo’s power is also likened to the supernatural, and the narrator and other characters often challenge the reader to believe that perhaps Trujillo is of supernatural origin.
Genre plays a related role in the novel as the author uses forms of these genres throughout the novel, emphasizing the sci-fi” and “fantasy” nature of life in the Dominican Republic by comparing Trujillo to Sauron of Lord of the Rings and to an episode of the TV show Twilight Zone, amongst other references. The narrator refers often to Oscar’s love of genre (not capitalized). The genres in reference are fantasy, science fiction, and comic books. Genre is associated with Oscar’s outsider status as a nerd. The novel’s characters loosely parallel characters from the Fantastic Four and thus liken the outsider to the hero.
