The Watcher In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

The Watcher In most third-person novels, the audience doesn’t know exactly who the narrator is – the author is the assumed narrator. In the case of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narration is told through first person, although the reader initially is not sure who this narrator is within the context of the novel itself. Through this narration, the reader gains a certain closeness to the subject matter, while feeling somehow distanced. It’s clear from the narration that this person is not a direct part of the Cabral family. Díaz does this to give the reader a sense that the speaker knows what he’s talking about, but he’s not as biased as a member of the family might be. Yunior cares enough about the Cabral family to do his research …show more content…
It’s easy to assume that the narrator is Díaz himself. The tone of the very beginning of the novel, “Part One,” implies that the story is not told from an unattached third person perspective. Even the footnotes are written in first person, so the narrator injects his own opinions and personality on fact. “The Golden Age” chapter begins by referring to Oscar as “our hero.” This is an ambiguous “our” – the reader doesn’t know if “our” refers to themselves and the narrator, or the narrator and his family, or the narrator and a specific person he’s writing to. The first few chapters of the novel can be confusing if the reader focuses too much on trying to identify the speaker. But once that confusion passes, the narration is almost comforting. This person cared about Oscar and continues to care about his family, enough so that he took the time to write down the story of the past three generations of Cabrals, and he made sure to do as much research as he could. The footnotes add an air of authenticity, even when they’re clearly skewed in the narrator’s …show more content…
This particular section does a good job of summing up the relationship between Lola and her mother as well as Lola’s narration style. After her mother falls, Lola hesitates and eventually turns back, justifying her actions by saying: “but when you’re someone’s daughter that she raised by herself with no help from nobody, habits die hard. I just wanted to make sure my mom hadn’t broken her arm or cracked open her skull. I mean, really, who the hell wants to kill her own mother by accident?” (66). Even when she feels some form of affection towards her mother, seemingly respecting her for being a single mother, she covers it up by claiming she didn’t want to be responsible for her mother hurting herself. With Lola constantly trying not to hate her mother or care too much about her, this balancing act would easily have gotten in the way when narrating the sections about Beli’s upbringing. Her love for her brother would have also gotten in the way during the sections about Oscar. While she knew him better than perhaps anyone and would have done a decent job covering the facts, she may not have been able to give an account that didn’t skew events or pity Oscar or wish for a different ending to his life. Yunior cared about Oscar, and his fondness is throughout the text, but he also does an