Character Analysis Of The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao?

Great Essays
Creating a novel where the ending is pretty clear from the start can be challenging to keep readers engaged. However, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao still manages to create a fascinating novel that readers want to complete, even if Oscar’s death was inevitable. Much of the credit goes to the author’s creation of the narrator and how he shapes him into a unique character. Junot Diáz has created a main narrator, Yunior, that uses self-consciousness and a conversational style of language to make an intriguing character that develops a personal relationship with the reader, encouraging them to be more engaged in the novel and to also question the importance of a narrator themselves. From the very beginning, the narrator made clear that …show more content…
Describing one of Oscar’s first “girl friends,” he says, “Jenni must have had brain damage or been really into fat loser nerdboys, because … she was actually treating him all civil and shit. Before I could wrap my brain around that one I saw them hanging out together! … I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes” (183). Yunior is very well aware of his position, retelling a story he observes through many primary sources and taking the liberty of adding his interpretation of the various situations. As a result, the readers receive a mix of a first person and third person narrator. The readers are given the perspective and thought process of the narrator, seeing things through his eyes, while at the same time being told the story as if the narrator were a spectator (for most of the book). This mixed narrator, while not the first of its kind, is very uncommon in literature. It’s this hybrid character that will surprise readers, realizing that a supposed third-person narrator is a real character interjecting with thoughts about certain events. Once this becomes apparent to the reader, they have to conclude why this is surprising. Without the narrator influencing the reader’s perspective of the story, and if all the opinions of the narrator were stripped away, the story would be dramatically different and would even change what the reader thinks about the plot and storyline, a fantastic revelation the reader will …show more content…
You can find this almost anywhere with one of the first examples coming from Beli. “You should have seen him, his mother sighed in her Last Days” (12). This may confuse readers at first as many usually expect to see spoken words surrounded by quotes. However, Yunior doesn’t seem to think it’s necessary to include them. Correct punctuation is not something you have to worry about in speech and Yunior clearly doesn’t care about it when writing this book. So this non-traditional writing style creates the sense that you are, again, having an informal conversation with Yunior. He is, after all, trying to create a comfortable atmosphere that doesn’t have to be formal in the slightest. Therefore, it may not be necessary to include quotation marks at all in the mind of Yunior. The initial shock the reader has about the unfamiliarity of incorrect punctuation will make the reader ask themselves why the author decided to go without the quotes. Further in the book, when one realizes that our narrator is actually a character in the story, they’ll ask themselves why Yunior has done without the quotes. This moment of self-discovery is also a brilliant way to allow readers to reflect upon the narrator. While the lack of punctuation is a subtle change, it makes the reader analyze the narrator as a character, which is exactly what Junot Diáz wants to keep the readers reading. Diáz makes

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