The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

1. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Diaz

2. http://www.annotated-oscar-wao.com/ Term Description Page # Galactus Galactus is a fictional character that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactus Fantastic Four The Fantastic Four is a fictional superhero team appearing in comic books published by Marvel Comics.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_four Stan Lee Stan Lee is an American comic book writer, editor, and the former president and chairman of Marvel Comics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_lee Jack Kirby Jacob Kurtzberg, better known by the pen name Jack Kirby, was an American comic book artist, writer and editor. In the 1960s, Kirby co-created many of Marvel Comics' major characters including the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Hulk along with writer-editor Stan Lee. Despite the high sales and critical acclaim of the Lee-Kirby titles, Kirby felt treated unfairly, and left the company in 1970 for rival DC Comics.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_kirby Derek Walcott Derek Walcott is a West Indies poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who writes mainly in English. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Walcott Dominican Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominican_republic The Admiral Christopher Columbus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_columbus 1 dique something like "as if" or "supposedly". Someone writes in: "you could also use 'they say' which is a more literal translation. ('di' - dicen)"http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dique Rafael Trujillo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Trujillo 2 caudillo “leader” pg. 2

3. AUTHOR: Junot Diaz was born December 31, 1968 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He immigrated to New Jersey in 1974. He was a voracious reader as a kid, and one of the only passionate readers in his neighborhood, as he recalls.

4. Diaz describes his childhood: “I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military.”

5. Diaz graduated Rutgers College as an English Major, and then went to Cornell University for his MFA. • Diaz is currently a professor at M.I.T. and fiction editor at the Boston Review. • His first collection of short stories, Drown, was published in 1996. • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.

6. Self-Reflection • “I had never met anyone like myself in my neighborhood,” says Díaz. “I was one of the only readers.” At Cedar Ridge High School, Díaz ended up in honors classes (“whiter than the Swiss volleyball team”), but he was an outsider. “Not only was I with predominantly white kids, but predominantly wealthy white kids,” he notes. “The gulfs were interstellar.”

7. “Rutgers, honestly, it was like a wonderland for me, like going from the black and white of Kansas to the Technicolor of Oz. I had never been around the density of so many smart, beautiful people.”

8. His turning point….Rutgers • “I felt like I had been orphaned from my people, and I had finally found where I belonged. It was just extraordinary. My life changed—just changed. It was just beautiful... When I got to Rutgers, it was the first time I felt safe since I left the Dominican Republic. A moment like that is hard to forget.”

9. The Title • A nod to Ernest Hemingway’s short story ”The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" • Quote: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives…to Galactus??” (Fantastic Four) • and to the Irish writer Oscar Wilde: his Dr. Who Halloween costume earns him the nickname Oscar Wao for the costume's resemblance to playwright Oscar Wilde (“Wao” a slurred, Dominican spin on the surname).

10. Dr. Who Oscar Wilde

11. What kind of novel is this? • Coming of age story? • Immigrant fiction? • Historical fiction? • Quest literature? • Comedy? • Tragedy? • Epic? • Or a collage – a volatile and combustible mash up – a mix tape of real, unreal, past, present, comedy, and tragedy ?

12. The novel begins with a quote by Derek Walcott: “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”

13. Structure • 1974-1987 - "GhettoNerd at the End of the World" - Oscar Wao • 1982-1985 - "Wildwood" - Lola • 1955-1962 - "The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral" - Hypatia "Belicia" Cabral • 1988-1992 - "Sentimental Education" - Oscar Wao and Yunior • 1944-1946 - "Poor Abelard" - Abelard Luis Cabral • 1992-1995 - "Land of the Lost" - Oscar Wao • "The Final Voyage" - Oscar Wao • "The End of the Story" - Oscar Wao and Yunior

14. Point of View  The reader never meets Oscar face-to-face; instead his story emerges piece by piece from other sources. Diaz says, “I felt like one of the biggest absences was hiding in plain sight, which is that we actually never meet directly the protagonist. The protagonist, Oscar, is always filtered through this other narrator, Yunior. Part of it was this desire to make Oscar simultaneously present but also entirely invisible. It was a strategy to talk a lot about how do you put a story together from fragments and how you put a story together from absences.”

15. The Narrators • Thoughts to consider: • Is Yunior a trustworthy narrator? Where does he get his information? What’s his motive in telling Oscar’s story? Why do you think Diaz doesn’t reveal Yunior’s exact name and role until mid-way through the book? • Is Diaz’s tale about Oscar? Or is it about Yunior?

16. Themes • Though the book is based on Oscar and his undeniable romanticism, the themes of family, love, alienation, and violence underwrite every action. Because of this, the plot intertwines past and present, Middle Earth and the Third World, the fantastic and brutal reality, the wondrous and the brief. • The book also weaves in a colonial history of the Dominican Republic, with all the violence and oppression of Trujillo.

17. Duality in the novel • Violence • Alienation • Brutal reality • Brief • Past • Middle Earth • Love • Family • Fantasy • Wondrous • Present • Third World

18. Allusions • Science fiction: e.g., Isaac Asimov • Fantasy: e.g., Lord of the Rings • Comic books: e.g., Spider Man • Literary figures: e.g., Oscar Wilde • Literary works: e.g., Invisible Man • Pop Culture: e.g., Dr. No, Land of the Lost • Dominican History: e.g., Trajillo

19. OLD FAVS

25. NEW FAVS

29. Setting • SETTING: The story is set in two locales—New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. This dual setting captures how the characters always feel out of place. The Dominican Republic is on the eastern end of the island of Hispaniola, bordered by Haiti on the west, and the North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea on the north and south respectively. • The Dominican Republic is about twice the size of the state of New Hampshire and as of 2005, had a population of approximately 8.9 million. The ethnic breakdown of the population is 16% white, 11% black, and 73% mixed.

32. History of the DR • Diaz’ first footnote of the novel alerts you to the importance of the history lessons he is about to impart, with evident sarcasm and a playful voice: • “For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history,” he begins, “Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 with an implacable ruthless brutality. A portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era Haberdashery…”

33. Footnotes • Unlike the footnotes most of us are used to in history texts, these are fast, hot and personal, in the voice of Yunior. • Yunior knows the dorkiest of sci-fi and Marvel comic book references; "My shout-out to Jack Kirby aside, it's hard as a Third-Worlder not to feel an affinity with Uatu the Watcher." • But he also quotes the post-colonial theorist Edouard Glissant, gives sweat-drenched details of the bedrooms and backseats of government officials and explains the fuku. • This curse is linked to the rotten luck of Oscar's family, Trujillo, and even the Kennedy clan.

34. Scientific American, January 15, 2008 “Did Columbus Bring Syphilis to Europe?” New research touts evidence as the strongest to date that he did.

35. Rafael Trujillo

36. “The portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto who bleached his skin...” • Rafael Trujillo took over control of the Dominican Republic in 1930, leaping swiftly from leader of the armed forces to President in the wake of a revolution, and quickly emerging as, in Diaz’ words, an almost supernatural dictator. He was assassinated in 1961, snapping a forty-year long streak with no democratic elections.

37. Dominican Republic — The CIA assassinates Rafael Trujillo. Here is the car, a 1956 Oldsmobile.

38. THE DR • Diaz makes Dominican history central to the book, almost a character itself. What do you think the stream of history-related footnotes running below the fictional narrative provides for the reader?

39. An Immigrant Story Like No Other • Oscar Wao thrilled American readers when it appeared in 2007 on the heels of a century of endless repetitions of the same immigrant narrative. The book was recognizably an immigrant story, yet it turned the tropes on their ears. Far from pandering to a non-Spanish-speaking readership expecting its exotica to be translated, Oscar Wao spoke the college-educated, ghetto-inflected Spang-nerd-glish its macho, comic-book-reading Dominican narrator spoke. Its metaphors came from Tolkien and The Silver Surfer. Its plot didn't follow the arc-de-triomphe of the traditional immigrant tale, but rather the melodramatic twists of a generation-spanning curse.

40. THREE TYPES OF STORIES • The standard immigrant story of escaping the Old World and assimilating to the New World and its dominant culture: • Eastern and central Europeans and Jews (late 1800s) • Asian Americans (late 21st century) • Sometimes called “model minorities” for conformity to American economics. • The minority narrative (African Americans, Native Americans) is not an immigrant story of voluntary participation and assimilation but of involuntary contact and exploitation, resisting assimilation, and creating an identity more less separate from the mainstream. • The New World immigrant (Hispanic/Latino/and Afro-Caribbean), which constitutes the largest wave of contemporary immigration, combines immigrant and minority narratives, voluntarily immigrating from the Caribbean/West Indies but often with experiences of involuntary contact and exploitation by the US in other countries, or identification with minorities through the color code.

41. The Color Code • Western civilization transfers symbolic values associated with “light and dark”—e. g., good & evil, rational / irrational—to people of light or dark complexions, with huge implications for power, validity, sexuality, etc. • Skin color matters as a marker of identity and difference in race, class, etc… • Dark & light or black & white have many shades between, but descriptions are sensitive and change rapidly to avoid stereotyping. For example: “half-breeds” become “biracial” • In-between color traditionally symbolizes various hopes and fears from both sides of a cultural divide. • Another in-between variation is the shift of the United States from a "White & Black nation” to a "Brown nation" defined by growing Hispanic populations and intermarriage.

42. Certainly, it is Post-Modern • Whereas Modernism places faith in the ideas, values, beliefs, culture, and norms of the West, Postmodernism rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small part of the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms.

43. 2nd aspect of postmodernism • Whereas Modernism attempts to reveal profound truths of experience and life, Postmodernism is suspicious of being "profound" because such ideas are based on one particular Western value systems.

44. 3rd aspect of postmodernism • Whereas Modernism attempts to find depth and interior meaning beneath the surface of objects and events, Postmodernism prefers to dwell on the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects and events.

45. 4th aspect • Whereas Modernism focused on central themes and a united vision in a particular piece of literature, Postmodernism sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, "jagged," with no one specific reality possible.  Therefore, it focuses on a vision of a contradictory, fragmented, ambiguous, indeterminate, unfinished, "jagged" world.

46. 5th aspect • Whereas Modern authors guide and control the reader’s response to their work, the Postmodern writer creates an "open" work in which the reader must supply his own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his own (unguided) interpretation.