The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Certainly, a pervasive theme throughout Junot Diaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is identity, specifically the desire to be loved and accepted as an individual. Diaz utilizes the intensity of cultural identity issues that arise from transnational identity to highlight the struggle for love acceptance that occurs in various arenas in life- romantic, familial, and communal and asses how individuals “grapple with and assert their identity.” (Solis 14) Throughout his novel, Diaz is constantly presenting the reader with examples of failed bids for love and acceptance- thus, in the final chapters when the reader is presented with the first example of true, successful love, he is aware of its power and beauty.

As Richard Perez points out in Transamerican ghosts: The face, the abyss, and the dead of new world post-coloniality, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao then, is a love story, individual, communal, hemispheric, where love fails to take root in any of its characters, their emotional lives rendered barren by the traumatic histories to which they are born.” (Perez 81) Throughout the novel Diaz presents the reader with countless examples of failed love, of “disfigured identities”. (Perez 12) We see Lola vying for, yet never receiving, her mother's love and praise as a child. We see Beli vying for romantic love, first with first with Jack Pujols, then with the Gangster, and finally with Oscar and Lola's father. Oscar is the novel's most extreme example of rejection, obese and nerdy; he cannot seem to fit in, in any sense. Oscar's virginity is a physical representation of the denial he has experienced on so many levels- “The consequence of Oscar's grotesque identity is a complete social rejection, depicted comically in the novel as his failure to find a woman to love him”. (Perez 92) Diaz makes the “the often-stifling inadequacies of love” incredibly apparent to the reader. (Hannan 65) And thus it is within this thematic context that we must examine the novel's final chapter's, in which the reader encounters the first example, if not the only example, of true love, of true acceptance that the novel presents, when Oscar returns to the Dominican Republic (with a blatant disregard for the inherent danger of doing so) in chase of Ybon.

It is interesting to note that there is a strong sense of fragmentation in regards to time and space ...