“It would have been one thing if...he hadn't cared about girls, but alas he was still the passionate enamorao who fell in love easily and deeply” (23). So goes the love life of Oscar in Junot Diaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of OscarWao. The title character was an overweight, nerdy Dominican boy who never had the luxury of love, even though he fell hard and fast for most of the girls he was around. Take his sister Lola's friends: they hung out at his house every day, but the closest he got to them was in his imagination when porn magazines weren't what he wanted. And of course, there was Ana Obregon, who Oscar fell for because of the fact that she actually talked to him. But of course, the love of Ana was only for the ex-druggie Manny, and Oscar had to deal with being shunted to the role of just friends.
Of course, Oscar is not the only character to find love in the most unexpected and not-so-good-for-you places. Lola ran away from home for a boy, Aldo, and gave up her virginity because that's what you do “to some boy you thought you loved” (64). Lola's 'love' was different than Oscar's, though, because the main reason Lola left was to get away from her overbearing and sometimes (in her eyes) cruel mother who didn't know anything about love. Ironically enough, Hypatia Belicia Cabral (Beli), mother to Oscar and Lola, was taken in by the young thoughts of love, allowing Jack Pujols, the whitest and most beautiful of the boys in school, to invade her thoughts and eventually her body, all for the sake of 'love' (86 & 100).
It is easy to see how Oscar came to be the hopeless romantic that eventually takes his love too far, and ends up dead because of it. Coming from a family that falls in love so quickly with people, in addition to being Dominican, means that Oscar is helpless from the start. He doesn't know a different way to love other than falling for someone, and hoping eventually she will notice him and reciprocate his feelings. Sadly, the only eventual outcome of that love was disaster and death. He wanted to love so badly that he chose the wrong woman to fall in love with, and paid for it in the Dominican Republic, in the cane fields where the mongoose that saved his mother could not save him.
It is also possible that the love struck Oscar was suffering due to the fuku, the curse that started with Columbus and permeated all of the Dominican culture. Yunior, the narrator of the novel, calls his novel a zafa, a counter-curse, to the fuku, but it doesn't seem like Oscar had the same luck with counter-curses. Instead, he had to deal with the facts: he had no father, his mother had cancer, he loved girls and girls and girls, but none of those girls loved him. Then, he found the woman he loved, but she was claimed by someone else: typical Oscar luck. He did eventually woo the woman he loved, after he stalked her for weeks in the DR, but of course this came to the worst end possible. Out in the cane fields of the country, Oscar was killed because of his love. The fuku came to claim another victim, even one who only possessed one of the most basic urges: to love and be loved in return.
I hadn’t thought about how the way Oscar loved may be due in part to those family members before him, that he would have learned from. An interesting take; I wonder if we glean the same type of insight or tendency from our parents?
ReplyDeleteThe strange thing is, in their own messed up ways, the way his family members loved worked. They found people, and they found love (however ethereal it may have been). But for Oscar, other parts of who he is gets in the way. If he learned many things from his family, where did he learn something that made him so different? What factors in his life drove him to be such an outsider?
I was also interested in how characters experienced love and how their understanding of love changed. I was struck by how falling in love "easily and deeply" can be so terribly painful. Though love is difficult, it seems that overall, love in itself should be something beautiful no matter what. But the effects of the love Oscar feels for women throughout the book leave him even more vulnerable and heartbroken. It is love that is the means to Oscars death.
ReplyDeleteI also thought it was intriguing to consider his family history and the possibilities of how that affected the way he experienced love. You're right, to love and be loved in return is something so simple, yet it is something Oscar struggled with throughout his life.