Characters in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

When one first sees a copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz they assume it’s simply a boring story about some Asian kid named Oscar and his seemingly short life. They would be completely wrong. Diaz’s very experimental novel chronicles the Cabral family of the Dominican Republic, beginning with Oscar De Leon, an overweight sci-fi nerd that has never kissed a girl. His sister Lola, a tough as nails Dominican girl who’s constantly ruled by her emotions, and their mother Belicia ‘Beli’ Cabral, a once beautiful girl who’s fallen from grace and now is less than an ideal parent.

Diaz utilizes numerous themes throughout the story, with the most prominent being one of escapist sentiment and diaspora.

Oscar Wao lives a mostly isolated life. His writing, comic books, and other sci-fi nerd staples constantly monopolize his time and keep him locked up in his room, to the chagrin of his mother. Even after graduating and beginning his attendance a, Rutgers University, he continues these seemingly anti-social tendencies.

Oscar uses Sci-Fi as a way to escape his life. He writes as a way to express himself, because outside of his room he is constanly used as the butt of other students’ jokes. After rejection upon rejection from nearly every girl he’s ever ‘loved’, he begins to develop self-hatred. “He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life.

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He didn’t want this future but he couldn’t see how it could be avoided, couldn’t figure his way out of it. Fuku.” (Diaz, 268).

Oscar dreads becoming the stereotypical decrepit nerd; lonely, forever and always. He desperately wants to escape what could barely be referred to as a life. He eats as a coping mechanism, which in turn just causes him to gain more weight, which makes people give him even more grief. As a last ditch effort to escape the pain, he attempts suicide, but fails and is right where he started. His sister, Lola, fares no better. After being attacked as a young girl, she never really recovers emotionally. She appears to be controlled by an imaginary feeling that makes her want to run far away from her overly controlling, threatening, cancer ridden mother, Belicia.

She recounts that all of her “favorite books from that period were about runaways, Watership Down, The Incredible Journey, My Side of the Mountain, and when Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” came out, I imagined it was me they were singing about” (Diaz, 57). She has a strong desire to run away and, unlike Oscar, actually does. It proves unsuccessful, however and she is eventually dragged back by her mother. She feels as if she doesn’t belong which, ironically, her mother once felt as well.

Diaz uses Lola and Oscar as examples of teenage subculture, because as nearly every teen tells you, they feel as if they’re abnormal and ‘don’t belong’. Both characters simply want to escape, whether that be through an act as simple as running away or suicide. They have to get out.

“If these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.” (Diaz. 209)