"Equal Partners in Crime": Narration in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Master's Theses

Summer 8-2015

"Equal Partners in Crime": Narration in The Brief Wondrous Life of "Equal Partners in Crime": Narration in The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao Oscar Wao

Rebecca Mae Holder

University of Southern Mississippi

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The University of Southern Mississippi

“EQUAL PARTNERS IN CRIME”:

NARRATION IN THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

Rebecca Mae Holder

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate School

of The University of Southern Mississippi

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Master of Arts

Approved:

_____________________________________

Dr. Monika Gehlawat, Committee Chair

Associate Professor, English

_____________________________________

Dr. Katherine Cochran, Committee Member

Associate Professor, English

_____________________________________

Dr. Maureen Ryan, Committee Member

Professor, English

_____________________________________

Dr. Karen S. Coats

Dean of the Graduate School

August 2015

ABSTRACT

“EQUAL PARTNERS IN CRIME”:

NARRATION IN THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

by Rebecca Mae Holder

August 2015

This reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao argues that

narrator Yunior’s failure to capture the authentic speech of Beli illuminates the failure of

narrative generally to speak authentically for the subaltern. The writings of Mikhail

Bakhtin, Gayatri Spivak, and Scott McCloud work together to uncover the political and

ethical implications of Yunior’s willful erasure of Beli’s voice. In the sections detailing

her early life, Yunior draws attention to the gaps in the information he gives readers and

thus reminds them that all narrative excludes and distorts details to fulfill an objective.

This reading argues that those gaps of information that Yunior calls “blank pages”

function similarly to the gutters in comic books. The gutters Yunior creates force the

readers to fill in the blank pages with their own interpretation of events, and, in the end,

both Yunior and the readers are complicit in erasing Beli’s voice from her story.

iii

DEDICATION

I would like to express my gratitude to my parents for their unwavering support,

both in the process of writing my thesis and in all other things I do in life. Mom and Dad,

your prayers and encouragement help me do better work and be a better person than I

could on my own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Monika Gehlawat for her guidance throughout the

process. Her feedback was invaluable in shaping my research and writing, and I am

deeply grateful for her hard work and dedication. I would also like to express my

gratitude to Drs. Kate Cochran and Maureen Ryan for their comments and advice, which

helped to refine my ideas and clarify my writing. Finally, I am also indebted to Dr. Luis

Iglesias and the members of our workshop, all of whom provided me with encouragement

and suggestions for my research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………ii

DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………..iv

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………...…………1

II. METHODOLOGY…………………………………………………..……2

III. OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE……………………………………..…..8

IV. TEXTUAL ANALYSIS……………………………………………..…..10

V. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………..……30

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………31

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In a 2013 interview at the Chicago Humanities Festival, NPR’s Peter Sagal asked

Junot Díaz if he considers himself the voice of the Dominican immigrant experience.

Díaz has repeatedly turned to the subject of the Dominican-American diaspora in his

short story collections Drown (1996) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), and his novel

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). In his response to Sagal’s question, Díaz

emphasized Oscar Wao’s “utter particularity” over its perceived ability to speak for an

entire group of people, remarking, “I’ve always been interested in the way white

supremacy narrativizes the world.” Díaz’s works confront this white supremacist

narrative by interrogating the political and ethical functions of all narrative, and Oscar

Wao exposes the inherently political and ethical nature of narrative through its narrator,

Yunior. In Oscar Wao, Yunior crafts a story that spans three generations of the Cabral

family and follows the family curse from its birth in the Dominican Republic to its

apparent, though inconclusive, end with Oscar’s death. Yunior seems to be close enough

to the family to give readers a complete account; he was Oscar’s roommate at Rutgers,

dated Oscar’s sister Lola, and traveled with the family to Santo Domingo to see Oscar in

the hospital. While he was in Santo Domingo, he gathered as much information as he

could about the events from each generation’s encounter with the fukú [curse]. Still, his

account of Oscar’s mother’s involvement in the fukú has gaps of silence where Yunior

fails to provide definitive information.

CHAPTER II

METHODOLOGY

Throughout Beli’s story, Yunior refers to the “páginas en blanco,” the blank

pages that he leaves empty because of his own narrative limitations, and he ultimately

offers these blank pages to the reader as an invitation to participate in the construction of

his narrative. Comic books, a medium Yunior knows well, use blank space between

panels to encourage readers to fill in the blanks with what Scott McCloud calls “closure”

in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993). He defines closure as “the

phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). All media forms

make use of this phenomenon, but the comic book medium most explicitly makes the

reader a conscious collaborator in constructing the narrative. In comic books, the blank

space between panels is called the “gutter” (McCloud 66). As our eyes move from one

panel to the next, we fill in the blank space with an action that leads to the next panel.

Filling in these blanks makes us “an equal partner in crime known as the reader,”

committing actions right alongside the comic book writers and illustrators (McCloud 68).

In Oscar Wao, Yunior creates his own gutters by leaving metaphorical blank pages in

Beli’s story and literal ones in the book’s penultimate section, highlighting the reader’s

complicity in Yunior’s self-conscious narrative.

In his telling of Beli’s story, Yunior is at his most self-conscious, acknowledging

his limitations and personal motivations as a narrator. By calling attention to his own

choices, he demonstrates how narrative always has a political and ethical function. By

pointing out this fact, Yunior complicates our own position as readers. Wayne Booth

argues that readers have an ethical responsibility to engage with a text on an author’s

terms, writing, “To decline the gambit, to remain passive in the face of the author’s

strongest passions and deepest convictions is surely condescending, insulting, and finally

irresponsible” (350). Yunior’s narration subverts this responsibility, encouraging readers

to interrogate the narrative rather than to accept its claims as a final authority on history.

Ultimately, Yunior’s meta-narrative warns us to doubt the authenticity of any narrative.

In its construction, Oscar Wao seems to comprise a variety of authentic voices;

Yunior’s narration cuts across three generations of the Cabral family and includes

excerpts from Oscar’s writings and sections narrated by Lola. In this regard, the novel fits

Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of a polyphonic novel. In Bakhtin’s Problems of

Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984), he praises Dostoevsky’s novels for their ability to represent

a multitude of voices that all maintain independence. These voices all have “equal

rights,” which speak for characters as “autonomous subjects, not objects” (6, 7). By

constructing a plot from multiple “fields of vision,” Dostoevsky guarantees that none of

the novel’s characters function as the definitive authorial voice, and none “constitute[s]

the novelistic world in its entirety” (16, 25). While Bakhtin praises dialogic narrative, he

also observes that Dostoevsky’s greatest strength was also a weakness: “It seems that

each person who enters the labyrinth of the polyphonic novel somehow loses his way in it

and fails to hear the whole behind the individual voices” (43). Thus, though Dostoevsky

masterfully crafts autonomous subjects, the polyphony creates a chorus of voices that

obscures the novel’s overarching voice.

While Dostoevsky’s novels are polyphonic, Oscar Wao goes a step further and

places this polyphony of characters within a narrative structure that is itself polyphonic.

The novel’s structure comprises multiple “fields of vision” in its array of voices, but

Yunior constructs the “whole behind the individual voices” by expanding his narrative to

include multiple time periods, geographic locations, and narrative voices (Bakhtin 16,

43). Oscar Wao is separated into three acts, and the preface and epilogue provide a

formal meta-narrative frame for the novel. In the preface, the as-yet-unnamed narrator

claims to write the following book as a form of zafa, a counterspell to ward off the fukú,

the curse that has beleaguered the Dominican Republic generally and the Cabral family

specifically. The novel’s penultimate section shares narrator Yunior’s hope for an

imagined future—that Lola’s daughter Isis will come to visit him and read his writings to

end the curse. The sections of the novel between preface and epilogue shift between time

periods, geographical locations, and characters. Some chapters focus on Oscar’s life, and

others tell the stories of his family members, most notably his mother Beli and her father

Abelard. The novel covers more than fifty years (1944–1995) with significant gaps in the

events of Beli’s story, while the setting alternates between New Jersey and the

Dominican Republic. Yunior narrates the majority of the novel, but Oscar’s sister Lola

narrates two long sections and La Inca and Ybón narrate one short section each within

Yunior’s narration, implying that he documented their words. Díaz’s novel, then,

represents a variety of voices in its narrative structure. This polyphony calls attention to

one notably absent voice of a character who fails to narrate her own story: Beli. Her

absence in Oscar Wao’s polyphony raises questions about the ethics of speaking for

another person in narrative. Though the polyphonic novel’s strength lies in its authentic

representation of multiple voices, Beli’s absence implies that some voices are incapable

of authentic speech.

Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel promotes the presence of

autonomous voices, all with “equal rights,” but both Bakhtin and Dostoevsky presume

the possibility of subjects with equal access to self-representation and thus literary voice.

In her landmark essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1987), Gayatri Spivak critiques this

premise by questioning the postcolonial subject’s ability to speak. She argues that the

subaltern

cannot speak because he or she is not a Subject within the dominant discursive

community but is instead subject to the dominant discursive community.

The subaltern

exists in relation to the dominant power structure, but he or she has never fully adopted

the dominant discourse and thus remains unable to engage in its discourse. In addition,

Subjects in the dominant discursive community cannot accurately represent or speak for

the subaltern because of their own privileged position within the discourse. Spivak

identifies the position of privilege that prohibits intellectuals from accurately representing

the speech of the subaltern and inquires, “We must now confront the following question:

on the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and

outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education

supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?” (283). Spivak

concludes that neither authentic speech nor accurate representation is available to the

subaltern. From Spivak’s analysis, we discover, then, that Bakhtin’s exposition of

Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel relies upon a crucial but ultimately overreaching

Spivak refers to the subaltern within an Indian context as those who are not among the

colonial elite—from the lower classes to the upper middle classes— with a specific focus

on women, but her conclusions extend beyond this group to a statement about the ethics

of speaking for the subaltern in general.

In Spivak’s writings, capital-S Subject refers to the noun, or a person who is a Subject,

while lower-case subject refers to the adjective, or a person who is subject to the

dominant discursive community. I follow her distinction in this essay.

assumption: that every character within the novel has the equal right, and thus capacity,

to speak.

Together, Bakhtin and Spivak provide a way to approach the multiple voices we

hear in Díaz’s novel as well as those that are notably absent. Though absent, Beli’s voice

should appear in the novel. After all, Yunior knows her personally, and she is alive for

most of the novel’s events. But Beli’s connection to Spivak’s figure of the subaltern

poses the novel’s essential narrative question. Beli represents the subaltern because of her

dark skin

and her early years as a girl in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo’s

regime. In contrast, Yunior is a lighter-skinned Dominican-American man born and

educated in the U.S. and accustomed to its liberal humanist tradition. The novel’s

fundamental narrative problem, then, is how Yunior can represent Beli’s voice and, by

extension, the voices of the thousands of Dominican citizens living under years of

totalitarian dictatorship. To honor those victims, Yunior’s narration must necessarily fail

to speak for them. Yunior grapples with this paradox by anchoring his narration with the

margins of the traditional novel, using references to comic books, fantasy, science fiction,

role-playing games, and other forms of popular culture, as well as extensive footnotes

that literally occupy the margins of the page and provide historical context. If we

interrogate Yunior’s narration, we discover that his account of Beli’s life uses

heteroglossia

to speak for his Dominican and Dominican-American subjects through its

Though Yunior calls Beli “black” throughout the novel, he refers to the darkness of her

skin color rather than her race.

Bakhtin’s term that literally means different languages. For Bakhtin, language is not

unitary but heteroglossic, consisting of innumerable structures that represent various

interests according to time, character, and space. He claims that the novel is inherently

heteroglossic because of its ability to reproduce various characters and scenarios, all

requiring different systems of meaning and representing multiple voices that still exist

comic book realism, polyphony, footnotes, and the supernatural. While the entire novel

employs this heteroglossia, Chapter Three, entitled “The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia

Cabral 1955–1962,” shows Yunior at his most self-aware. Beli’s uniquely subaltern

position as a dark-skinned woman in the Dominican Republic and later in New Jersey

makes her story the most politically and ethically complicated in the novel. Unlike her

relatives La Inca and Abelard, Beli is a diasporic subject who experienced both the

horrors of Trujillo’s dictatorship and “the loneliness of diaspora” (164). Yunior knows

that speaking for Beli is presumptuous and ethically irresponsible. Rather than attempt to

speak authentically for Beli, he makes an ethical choice to withhold portions of her story

and to rely on heteroglossia to narrate what he can.

within an authorial voice. See “Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination

(1981).

CHAPTER III

OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE

Yunior’s narrative style has been the subject of critical work on Oscar Wao;

however, these readings of the novel connect Yunior’s narration to issues of genre and

politics instead of taking his narration on its own terms. Daniel Bautista examines the

novel’s connection to the magical realist genre and its use of comic book, science fiction,

and fantasy references, arguing that Oscar Wao functions as a subversion of the

traditional magical realist genre. Ben Railton places Oscar Wao in conversation with

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Willa

Cather’s My Ántonia in his article focusing on novelist-narrators and the American

Dream. Railton views narration in these novels as attempting to author a realistic

chronicle of the American Dream, concluding, “[N]ovelist-narrators both participate in

and exemplify American literary realism’s own contributions to the understanding,

ongoing development, and revision of seminal narratives like the American Dream”

(150). Both Bautista and Railton argue that Oscar Wao complicates the genres and

themes it engages, whether magical realism or the American Dream.

While Bautista and Railton examine Oscar Wao’s narrative technique and its

effect on genre, neither critic comments on the issue of authenticity in narration. Elena

Machado Sáez’s “Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous

Life of Oscar Wao” (2011) engages with this issue, claiming, “By pulling back the veil of

an omniscient voice and revealing Yunior as the narrator, Díaz underscores the dangers

involved in accepting the authenticity of any historical narrative, even the fiction that he

himself writes” (527). This analysis of Yunior’s narration shifts control from Yunior to

Díaz and thus highlights authorship over narration. Rather than take Yunior’s narration

on its own terms, Sáez connects Oscar Wao to the suppressed queerness of the

Dominican diaspora. She argues that in Yunior’s narration of Oscar’s story, “the personal

becomes political” and Yunior eventually “becomes the spokesperson for a disturbing

model of diasporic masculinity” (541, 544). Bautista, Railton, and Sáez all take a

narrative approach to Oscar Wao, but their readings connect the narrative to outside

issues of genre and politics. In my reading of Oscar Wao, I focus on Yunior’s narrative as

such; rather than make an argument about thematic issues of genre or politics, Yunior’s

narrative reveals that narrative itself serves a political and ethical function.

CHAPTER IV

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

To demonstrate narrative’s failure to represent all voices authentically, Yunior

constructs several meta-narrative frames using heteroglossia. The novel’s introduction

invokes the spiritual meta-narrative frame of fukú and zafa. On one level, this frame

represents Yunior’s commitment to speaking for his Dominican subjects because of their

own belief in the supernatural, but it ultimately reveals his own narrative limitations and

invites the reader to question the existence of the supernatural. In the novel’s first pages,

Yunior introduces fukú and zafa—curse and counterspell—and by doing so, he appears to

fall into a long tradition of Latin American magical realist authors who include elements

of the supernatural in their work. Yunior himself acknowledges the inherently magical

landscape of Latin America: “But no matter what the truth, remember: Dominicans are

Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena” (149).

For Yunior, however, fukú and zafa function differently than the supernatural in works of

magical realism. Amaryll Beatrice Chanady offers a useful definition: “In contrast to the

fantastic, the supernatural in magical realism does not disconcert the reader, and this is

the fundamental difference between the two modes. The same phenomena that are

portrayed as problematical by the author of a fantastic narrative are presented in a matter

of fact manner by the magical realism” (24). In magical realism, the supernatural is never

explained, and characters simply allow it to coexist with reality; Yunior uses fukú and

zafa as a narrative frame for understanding the events in his story, and he draws attention

to the possibility that the supernatural does not exist.

As a narrator, Yunior has a responsibility to represent the voices of Dominicans

who interpret the Cabral family events through fukú and zafa, but he also bears a

responsibility to acknowledge his inauthentic representation of their speech. Thus, he

plants constant reminders of his own narrative limitations even as he tells “the story with

a supernatural twist” (243). From his first words, Yunior distances himself from those

who believe in fukú and zafa, telling readers “They say it came first from Africa” rather

than “I say.” He echoes this distinction in his explanation of the Fall of Abelard, writing,

“Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe

that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he couldn’t snatch her, out

of spite he put a fukú on the family’s ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened

happened” (243). In telling Abelard’s story, he distances himself from the believers with

his use of “they” instead of “I,” but this time his narrative distancing serves as a reminder

that Yunior did not experience the Trujillato firsthand. His youth limits his narration by

forcing him to rely upon second-hand versions of Beli’s story. Yunior himself says he

identifies with the “postmodern plátanos” who do not believe in supernatural concepts

like curses or prayer, but he alleges that during his parents’ generation, during the

Trujillato, “the fukú was real as shit, something your everyday person could believe in”

(144, 2).

Yunior’s narration appears to present the reader with the choice of whether or not

to believe in fukú. When he introduces Beli’s birth, he addresses the reader, “Zafa or

fukú? You tell me” (242). This ambivalence seems to be at odds with Yunior’s

authoritative position as narrator. If Yunior knows that fukú and zafa are real, the reader

would expect him to make a definitive statement of their truth to help her understand

Beli’s story. Instead of giving a final and conclusive answer, Yunior reminds the reader

that he must necessarily fail to give a complete account of the supernatural events. To

claim his narrative as the definitive portrayal of Beli’s story is to claim an authority

Yunior cannot access. Rather than use fukú and zafa to offer the reader a satisfying

explanation of Trujillo’s dictatorship generally and Beli’s victimization in particular,

Yunior explains that older generations believe in the curse while acknowledging his own

rejection of that belief. The ending of Oscar Wao seems to confirm the existence of the

supernatural, but even Yunior’s assertion that the book is his zafa complicates the

reader’s understanding of his beliefs.

Besides the curse and its counterspell, Yunior references a myriad of supernatural

characters from comic books, science fiction, and fantasy. He draws the world of comic

books—a world of superheroes, mutants, aliens, and more—into the Dominican

Republic, merging two supernaturally-influenced cultures together. One of Yunior’s most

striking narrative techniques is his use of what critic Daniel Bautista calls “comic book

realism” (42). Bautista describes Díaz’s mix of science fiction, comic book references,

and “gritty realism” as a new genre “that irreverently mixes realism and popular culture

in an attempt to capture the bewildering variety of cultural influences that define the lives

of Díaz’s Dominican-American protagonists” (42).

These references correspond to

Some critics argue that Díaz’s use of sci-fi/fantasy and comic book references serves to

make Trujillo’s regime appear more monstrous than it often seems in other literature.

Most notably in the article “Disseminating “El Chivo”: Junot Díaz’s Response to Mario

Vargas Llosa in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Chasqui, 2013), Victor

Figueroa argues that Díaz wrote his novel in part as a response to Mario Vargas Llosa’s

The Feast of the Goat. Vargas Llosa’s novel explores Trujillo’s motivations alongside his

actions, and Figueroa claims that this “psychologically realistic” portrayal of the dictator

emphasizes his humanity in order to generate a more sympathetic response from the

genre, speculative, and graphic forms of fiction, and they often appear in Yunior’s

historical references; for example, Yunior’s conceit comparing Trujillo and his confidants

to J.R.R. Tolkien’s villains Sauron and the Witchking of Angmar merges the historical

references with a fantasy reference.

On one level, Yunior’s narrative references pay

homage to Oscar, the novel’s nerdy protagonist, but Yunior’s use of this language also

reveals his own conflicted identity. Yunior strives to portray himself as a hyper-

masculine Dominican “sucio” [playboy], but his familiarity with the language of comic

books, science fiction, and fantasy reveals his own status as a nerd (169). For all his

posturing, Yunior invokes more obscure comic book references than he professes to

know. Thus, from Yunior’s first interaction with his audience, the novel encourages the

reader to interrogate Yunior’s narration and decipher the plurality of meanings in his

references.

In the introduction, the as-yet-unnamed narrator compares himself to a Marvel

figure called the “Watcher,” and a reader with no knowledge of the Marvel comic books

can easily miss this crucial reference (4). The narrator, revealed in chapter four as

Yunior, sets himself up as an authoritative and unbiased observer of events, writing,

“You want a final conclusive answer to the Warren Commission’s question, Who killed

JFK? Let me, your humble Watcher, reveal once and for all the God’s Honest Truth” (my

emphasis, 4). Yunior pointedly insists on the validity of his narrative by promising a

“final” and “conclusive” answer, but he then ironizes his position by claiming it to be

“God’s Honest Truth.” With the reference of the Warren Commission, Yunior compares

reader. Díaz responded by emphasizing Trujillo’s monstrosity through his use of comic

book and sci-fi references when describing Trujillo.

This particular use of comic book realism mirrors Tolkien’s own purpose for his Lord of

the Rings trilogy (1954), which mythologizes the monstrosity of World War II.

his narrative to this infamous “final” report that has itself been the subject of dispute and

conspiracy theories. He asks the reader to “let” him tell his story, but most significantly,

he refers to himself as “your humble Watcher.” The “your” implies that he belongs to the

reader, and his use of “humble” indicates his servitude to the reader. Yunior’s request for

permission and self-identification as “your humble Watcher” establish the novel’s meta-

narration but also remind readers of their own responsibility in constructing the narrative.

This responsibility means questioning Yunior’s own narrative authority, starting

with his claim to be a Watcher. In the Marvel comic book universe, the technologically-

advanced Watchers “decided it was their duty to help the universe’s less advanced races,”

but a failed experiment that brought atomic energy to another planet spurred the

Watchers to take a vow of non-intervention (“Uatu the Watcher” par. 1). Each Watcher

chose a solar system to observe and document, and the Watchers gathered sporadically to

share the information they found. Hidden in a footnote almost ninety pages later, Yunior

aligns himself with a specific Watcher: “My shout-out to Jack Kirby aside, it’s hard as a

Third-Worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Uatu the Watcher” (92). This

reference further characterizes Yunior’s narrative voice. Uatu was the Watcher who

chose to monitor Earth’s solar system, and he initially kept his vow of non-interference.

As time passed, however, he grew fond of humans and broke his vow multiple times.

Upon investigation, Yunior’s allusion to Uatu the Watcher in the novel’s introduction

serves as a warning for the narrative that follows. Yunior reveals his narrative

In the comics, Uatu often helps the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Spider-Man, and

other notable Marvel superheroes. Uatu, like all Watchers, possesses several superhuman

powers—telepathy, energy manipulation, and illusion casting—that all fall on the

“psionic” range, or the range of powers that derive from energy that is produced by the

mind (“Uatu the Watcher”).

omnipotence in order to warn readers of the danger of accepting his narrative without

question. Because Yunior has a personal connection to the specific subaltern Beli through

his relationship with her children, Oscar Wao is his broken vow of non-interference. To

tell her story ethically, then, Yunior must make readers aware of how his narration

controls and subsumes Beli’s authentic voice.

Elena Machado Sáez has identified Yunior’s “role as a dictator” within Oscar

Wao, a designation at odds with Yunior’s self-identification with Uatu the Watcher (529).

Yunior himself invokes Salman Rushdie’s words on the topic, asking, “What is it with

Dictators and Writers anyway? [ . . . ] Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are

natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators,

in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all,

recognizes like” (97). Yunior places this connection between dictators and writers in the

middle of one of the novel’s longest footnotes, making it easy to overlook. His revision

of Rushdie’s analysis of dictators and writers appears to indict writers of the same crimes

as dictators, though he actually implies that writers are more guilty of narrative control

than dictators are. Writers use the force of language to dictate this reality, literally writing

it into existence, where dictators merely control the reality that exists.

When he compares dictators to writers, Yunior offers us new insight into his own

narration as a form of dictatorship. Sáez uses Díaz’s own words to extend the idea of

dictatorship to the novel itself. In a Slate interview, Díaz says, “Just remember: In

dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a

story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters” (qtd.

in Sáez 528). As Díaz points out, the author himself is the only person speaking, no

matter how well he crafts a polyphonic novel with characters who function as individual

subjects claiming equal rights to the narrative. An author can write characters whose

personalities and subjective viewpoints differ greatly from his own, but the author

ultimately “speaks” by placing these characters within a larger narrative. This concept of

author as dictator echoes Spivak’s assertion that a Subject in the dominant discursive

community cannot accurately represent the speech of the subaltern, causing the reader to

question the authenticity of the author’s “speech.”

In the novel, Yunior offers more than a mere extension of Díaz’s voice because

Yunior himself is the “author” of Oscar Wao. In the novel’s self-conscious construction,

Yunior’s narration functions as a form of dictatorship; he curates the information we

learn, often leaving out significant portions of Beli’s story in particular. Yunior’s

narrative dictatorship, however, differs significantly from Trujillo’s literal dictatorship.

Where Trujillo used literal violence to silence his subjects, Yunior uses narrative control

that encourages readers to question the authenticity of his narrative. His heteroglossic

narration creates a challenge for many readers unfamiliar with the presence of the

Spanish language, comic book realism, spiritual language, and other obscure references,

but his narrative violence breaks down historical and cultural barriers that Trujillo’s

oppressive regime created by encouraging readers to read critically when engaging both

his own narrative and the national narrative about Dominican history.

Throughout his narrative, Yunior reminds the reader that he controls what we read

and operates from a privileged position. In the same footnote as his Salman Rushdie

reference, Yunior relays the story of Jesús de Galíndez, a “Basque supernerd and

Columbia University grad student who had written a rather unsettling doctoral

dissertation” on Trujillo’s regime (96-7). Yunior continues:

[U]pon learning of the dissertation, El Jefe first tried to buy the thing and

when that failed he dispatched his chief Nazgul (the sepulchral Felix

Bernardino) to NYC and within days Galíndez got gagged, bagged, and

dragged to La Capital, and legend has it when he came out of his

chloroform nap he found himself naked, dangling from his feet over a

cauldron of boiling oil, El Jefe standing nearby with a copy of the

offending dissertation in hand. (And you thought your committee was

rough.) (97)

Here, Yunior again calls attention to his identity as the narrator. At this point in the novel,

Yunior’s identity has not yet been revealed, but from his reference to the “Nazgul” of the

Lord of the Rings trilogy, we can determine that the narrator aligns himself with the

nerdiness he describes in Oscar and Galíndez. His Lord of the Rings reference and joke

about dissertation committees reminds readers that the narrator himself comes from a

specific background: he is Dominican-American, light-skinned, well-educated and well-

read, and he did not experience Trujillo’s dictatorship firsthand. His birthplace is the only

qualification he seems to have that renders him capable of speaking for Beli and

thousands of other victims. His position of academic and U.S. liberal humanist privilege

should grant Yunior access to the untold story of the Dominican Republic, but his

narration of Beli’s story in particular fails to incorporate her authentic speech. Yunior

fails to tell all of Beli’s story, and his comparison of writers and dictators as well as his

assertion of his academic privilege remind us of the danger in accepting the authority of

Yunior’s narration. By acknowledging his own limitations as a narrator, Yunior reveals

the inability of narration itself to give a “final” and “conclusive” version of any story.

Most significantly, however, in his macabre joke about dissertation committees,

Yunior’s ironic juxtaposition of third-world and first-world problems indicates Yunior’s

goal for his first world readers. This joke illustrates Yunior’s familiarity with the

dissertation process and thus suggests he has advanced degrees. It also gains more humor

for readers who have had dissertation committees, making it more of an inside joke

between people of academic privilege. More than create a connection between himself,

Galíndez, and the reader, the anecdote about Galíndez ultimately serves to empower the

reader. Yunior suggests that writing and research, even at a university far removed from

Trujillo’s reach like Columbia, could pose a threat to dictatorship, encouraging his

readers, first world “supernerds” like Galíndez, to be political themselves. He shows that

writing and researching can threaten the rule of dictators like Trujillo and encourages

readers to read against the grain of historical and cultural narratives to dismantle

oppressive hierarchies of power.

Yunior’s use of comic book realism appeals to his first world “supernerd” readers

and encourages them to interrogate the political and ethical aspects of narrative, but he

also problematizes this reader’s own position of academic privilege. He highlights his

reader’s lack of knowledge about Latin American politics by providing a historical

framework. Much of this historical framework comes in the form of footnotes, a narrative

device often used in editions of books aimed specifically at students that rhetorical

narrative theorists James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz argue functions “precisely to

give them [students] the information necessary to join the authorial audience” (Herman et

al. 140). Díaz’s novel utilizes footnotes in a manner similar to scholarly editions of

books, implying a teacher/student relationship between narrator and reader; however,

Oscar Wao’s footnotes provide historical and contextual information that is often tongue-

in-cheek, irreverent, and subversive. Yunior’s use of the vernacular and his off-hand tone

call attention to the insidious transparency of the scholarly footnote that tricks the reader

into accepting it as fact. In this sense, Yunior uses footnotes to reveal the reader’s

position of willed ignorance to suggest her compliance in constructing these historical

narratives.

The first of these footnotes comes immediately after Yunior’s first mention of

“[o]ur then dictator-for-life Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina” (2). After Yunior situates

the historical frame of the novel, his footnote encourages readers to conduct their own

research about America’s troubled history of supporting foreign dictators. The note that

follows begins, “For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican

history,” acknowledging a lack of awareness of Dominican history and politics in

Yunior’s audience (2). The footnote reads like an encyclopedia entry on Trujillo, albeit

with an acerbic tone, and the last section begins, “Outstanding accomplishments include:

[ . . . ]” (3). The second accomplishment Yunior lists is “one of the longest, most

damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere (and if we Latin types

are skillful at anything it’s tolerating U.S.-backed dictators, so you know this was a hard-

earned victory, the chilenos and the argentinos are still appealing)” (3). Yunior’s

provocative footnote glosses over Dominican history here and briefly references the

Dominican Republic’s place in a history of Latin American dictatorships, and this three-

line overview can be sufficient for situating the reader within a historical context.

Within this footnote, however, Yunior offers an Easter egg—a hidden message or

inside joke deliberately placed in a game, movie, show, or book.

This particular Easter

egg urges the reader to play the part of the student researching Latin American

dictatorships. The “chilenos” and the “argentinos” that Yunior references are “still

appealing” the ranking of “longest, most damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships” because of

their own former dictators: Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Juan Perón of Argentina. Both

Pinochet and Perón have been immortalized in film,

making them relatively well-known

to American audiences, and the artistic portrayals of these dictatorships condemn their

inhumane actions and stir audiences to despise both men. Yunior’s footnote, however,

places these dictators and Trujillo within the category of “U.S.-backed” dictators. In this

footnote, Yunior references the complicated history between the U.S. and Latin American

dictatorships, encouraging readers to think critically about these politics. By forcing

readers to question their own national narratives that conceal problematic politics, Yunior

prepares them to question why those narratives still hold such power over American

citizens.

See Mark J. P. Wolf’s Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art

of Gaming (2012) p. 177 for an extended definition.

Pinochet in Missing (1982) and No (2012), and Perón in Evita (1996).

In a later footnote, Yunior references the 1937 Haitian Genocide through both the

Plátano [Banana] Curtain and the Parsley Massacre. In calling it the Banana Curtain,

Yunior invokes the view many first world readers have of Central American countries as

Banana Republics. He also describes the “horrifying ritual of silence and blood, machete

and perejil [parsley], darkness and denial” that Trujillo used to create a “true border”

between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (224). Here, Yunior is referring to the Parsley

Massacre. Trujillo’s soldiers, armed with machetes, carried sprigs of parsley and asked

darker-skinned citizens to pronounce the name of the herb as a way of distinguishing

between Dominicans and Haitians. John J. McLaughlin explains, “If the answer of

‘perejil’ lacked a sufficiently trilled ‘r’ and aspirated ‘j’ to prove Spanish as their native

tongue and thus their ‘Dominican-ness,’ they were hacked to death” (par. 7). In his

references to the Plátano Curtain and perejil, Yunior is performing an act of historical

Yunior’s footnotes open a space for readers to join him in his knowledge of

alternate versions of history. The novel contains thirty-three footnotes, fifteen of which

are found in chapter three, entitled “The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral 1955–

1962.” Besides the footnotes in chapter three, four are directly connected to Beli in other

sections of the novel. Beli’s unique position in the novel as a dark-skinned Dominican

woman under the Trujillato and later as a diasporic subject makes her story the most

historically and culturally elusive. To fill in these gaps, Yunior uses footnotes to educate

the reader/student about the context of her story. The footnotes often deflect the reader’s

attention from Yunior’s narrative about Beli and her children to Dominican history, a

narrative choice that, again, indicates his ethical concerns about telling Beli’s story

because of her subaltern position.

In his narration of Beli’s birth, Yunior connects her skin color to the 1937 Haitian

genocide. Her blackness seems to confine her to the same victimhood Haitians

experienced under Trujillo’s rule, and many of her own family members associate her

skin color with the origin of the Cabral family fukú: “The family claims the first sign was

that Abelard’s third and final daughter, given the light early on in her father’s

capsulization, was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black—

kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack” (248). Beli’s skin color

aligns her with victims of Haitian genocide, but Yunior uses five descriptors of Beli’s

skin color, which comprise one printed line in the novel, to connect Beli to important

historical figures or symbols that emphasize the power inherent in her blackness,

presented in terms of global cultural reference.

recovery that, while irreverent, effectively forces the reader into the margins both

physically and historically.

He first claims she is “kongoblack,” referencing the former Kongo Kingdom in

West Africa that was settled by the Portuguese during the height of the slave trade. Beli is

also “shangoblack,” connecting her to the African warrior deity Shango from the African

Ifa religion. Yunior’s invocation of the god Shango, with his iconography of the ax, in

describing Beli’s blackness connects Beli’s birth to the African origin of darker-skinned

Haitians and Dominicans while also subverting Trujillo’s use of the machete to carve a

border between the two countries.

With this reference, Yunior implies that she holds the

power of the deity to wield the ax as “a symbol of swift and balanced judgment” and will

eventually subvert Trujillo’s rule (82). Yunior continues to connect Beli to powerful

deities by describing her as “kaliblack.” Kali is “the most frightening of the goddesses,”

and her name derives from kala, meaning both “she who is black” and “she who is the

ruler of time” (Jones and Ryan 220-1). Kali is often depicted holding a cutting instrument

in one hand and a man’s decapitated head in another, signaling her wrath against her

husband Shiva and men in general (Jones and Ryan 221). With these three descriptors,

Yunior empowers Beli by associating her blackness with goddesses known for violence

and justice and a powerful African kingdom. While her skin color appears to mark her as

a victim of circumstance, Yunior’s descriptions give her access to—at least for now—

forms of symbolic power.

Because this description of Beli comes after the chapter recounting her youth, the

reader already knows Beli will not in fact fulfill the role Yunior is empowering her with

The connection to Shango gains particular significance upon further investigation:

according to the Encyclopedia of African Religion, Vol. 1 (2008), “The Ax has great

religious significance in the Shango aspect of Ifa religion. [ . . . ] The ax represents a

warning against the arrogant use of military power to political leadership and represents a

symbol of swift and balanced justice” (82).

here. Thus, Yunior’s description of her blackness shifts from associating her with

powerful black goddesses or African kingdoms to foreshadowing the bitter end of her

story. Yunior describes Beli as “zapoteblack,” this time connecting Beli to a type of fruit

that grows in Central America and is very bitter in taste. The last descriptor Yunior uses

is “rekhablack,” a reference to Rekha, a Bollywood actress ostracized for her dark South

Indian complexion before allegedly undergoing skin lightening treatments that

transformed her into one of Bollywood’s most legendary performers. Connecting Beli to

the Kongo, Shango, and Kali accomplishes Yunior’s purpose of subverting Trujillo’s

hypermasculine, anti-Haitian regime, but the references to zapote and Rekha have a

subversive purpose as well. Beli’s story will fail to be one of the triumphant victory that

“kongoblack,” “shangoblack,” and “kaliblack” suggest. Her story will be a bitter one

because she, like Rekha, will attempt to shed her dark past to escape oppression. In his

far-reaching cultural allusions, Yunior not only offers foreshadowing of Beli’s complex

and ultimately tragic story; he also pushes the reader to consider blackness itself as more

complex than it seems. By empowering Beli through a connection to black deities and

kingdoms, Yunior reminds the reader that blackness has not always been subject to a

colonial narrative. In fact, some of the most powerful figures in history and mythology

are black, as he illustrates. In this sense, Beli’s story symbolizes an entire race’s story in

its historical connection to power but ultimately bitter oppression. Because he enables the

reader to see Beli’s blackness as imbued with historically complex symbolism, then,

Yunior encourages the reader to adopt a more critical stance toward current historical

narratives.

Yunior’s invocation of global historical references and his use of footnotes turn

readers’ critical attention to historical and cultural narratives that we often accept without

question. In his use of polyphony, he seems to promise that his own narrative will

provide authentic speech for his Dominican subjects, but his narration of Beli’s story

shows us that he cannot keep this promise. In narrating Beli’s story, Yunior exposes the

process of constructing his narrative most explicitly because of his own sense of ethical

responsibility for both Lola and Beli. Although Yunior acknowledges his intentional

narration of Beli’s life in Chapter Three, he allows Beli’s own voice to appear

occasionally. These moments of authentic speech always stem from one of two sources:

conversations Lola had with Yunior in which she relayed her mother’s story, and a

formal interview between Beli and Yunior, possibly on Beli’s deathbed with Lola

present. When Yunior narrates Beli’s first encounter with the Gangster, he relinquishes

his narrative control to Lola, writing, “Or as she broke it down to Lola in her Last Days:

All I wanted was to dance. What I got instead was esto [this], she said, opening her arms

to encompass the hospital, her children, her cancer, America” (113). From Yunior’s

references to Beli’s own voice, the reader surmises that much of Yunior’s information

about Beli’s life comes from conversations between Beli and Lola during the last days of

Beli’s life. Yunior has access to these conversations because of his own complicated

relationship with Lola, which appears in various sections of the novel. They ultimately

break up because, Yunior says, “Couldn’t keep my rabo [penis] in my pants, even though

she was the most beautiful fucking girl in the world” (311). While Yunior acknowledges

that he loves Lola, he seems unable to stay faithful. When Oscar asks Yunior why he

cheats on Lola, he answers, “If I knew that, it wouldn’t be a problem” (313). He knows

he has failed to uphold his ethical responsibility to Lola, and this failure extends to his

appropriation of her voice as well.

While his appropriation of Lola’s voice gives him access to Beli’s words, Yunior

also grants Beli the ability to speak for herself four times in his narration of her story. The

first time Beli’s own voice appears, Yunior neither distinguishes her voice from his nor

explains how he has access to it (119). In the following two appearances, Yunior signals

that Beli’s voice is separate from his own with italics and parentheses, though he still

does not explain how or when Beli spoke these words (127, 130). Finally, near the end of

Beli’s story, Yunior reveals his source: “I wish I could say different but I’ve got it right

here on tape. La Inca told you you had to leave the country and you laughed. End of

story” (160). Here, Yunior steps back from the narrative he is constructing and discloses

his research process. He has Beli’s story “right here on tape,” indicating that, at some

point, he sat down with Beli and recorded at least part of her story. He waits to reveal this

information to the reader until he has almost finished narrating Beli’s story. Once we

know Yunior has had access to Beli’s authentic speech all along, readers question

Yunior’s motives for exerting narrative control. By leaving clues for the reader to

discover the existence of Beli’s narration, Yunior reminds the reader that accepting his

narrative means erasing the possibility of Beli’s authentic voice because in Oscar Wao,

Yunior is a narrative dictator who allows only his voice to tell Beli’s story. His deliberate

choice to commandeer Beli’s story instructs us to question his own narrative’s validity

and the validity of narrative generally.

Interestingly, Yunior allows Lola to narrate two sections of the novel entirely in her

own voice. He never tells us exactly how he recorded her voice, but I argue that Yunior

allows Lola’s authentic speech in his narrative to assuage his own guilty conscience for

his betrayal of her in their relationship.

In highlighting his willful erasure of Beli’s voice, Yunior’s narration forces the

responsibility for Beli’s story onto the reader. Throughout his section detailing Beli’s

near-death experience, he refers to her as “our girl,” forging a bond with readers in a

mutual ownership of Beli. In narrating her emigration, Yunior cements this bond and

reveals the purpose of his narrative dictatorship. “[R]ansacked to the limit of [her] soul,”

Beli boards a plane to New York City, and Yunior narrates the last moments of Beli’s

story:

Here she is, closer now to the mother we will need her to be if we want

Oscar and Lola to be born. She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness

before the black, the plum of the day’s last light, her breasts like sunsets

trapped beneath her skin [ . . . ]. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold,

the backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora, that

she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. (164)

Here, Yunior’s narration of Beli’s story shifts from a close narration to a long shot,

allowing the reader to see Beli as he sees her and finalizing his and the reader’s mutual

ownership of her. In his narration, Yunior’s language echoes the poetic words of the

Gangster, who told Beli she was “una tormenta en la madrugada” [a storm at dawn]

(127). Where the Gangster saw in Beli’s body “a storm at dawn,” Yunior sees “sunsets

trapped beneath her skin.” This shift from dawn to dusk in describing Beli indicates the

finality of her story at this point in the novel. Her relationship with the Gangster is over

and she has played her part in Yunior’s larger story about all three generations. Yunior

knows Beli as the mother of his sometimes girlfriend Lola, and he knew the ending of

Beli’s story before he investigated its beginnings. In this moment, Yunior knows more

about Beli than she herself knew at the time, enabling him to fill in the “páginas en

blanco” [blank pages] that Beli could not yet. He describes Beli’s future, filled with “the

cold, backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, [and] the loneliness of Diaspora.” He

betrays his position of narrative control in this transition to Beli’s future and his

description of her as “closer now to the mother we will need her to be if we want Oscar

and Lola to be born.” Beli’s story functions only as part of the larger story Yunior is

telling because the narrative belongs to Yunior. His final narration of Beli’s story shows

that the reader owns the narrative as well; Yunior claims that “we” need “our girl” Beli to

take the last steps of her story onto the plane and become Oscar and Lola’s mother. We,

both reader and Yunior, have gone on a journey together to “unearth” Beli’s story, and

both reader and Yunior are responsible for Beli’s narrative.

In his penultimate section, Yunior returns to his heteroglossic narration to

highlight the reader’s ethical position in constructing his narrative. He tells us at the end

of the novel that he has constructed this narrative for Isis, Lola’s daughter, describing his

purpose for writing the novel: “And maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as

I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own

insights and she’ll put an end to it [the fukú]. That is what, on my best days, I hope. What

I dream” (330-1). His hopes that Isis will use his narrative to end the fukú imply that he

hopes Oscar Wao’s literal readers will “take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and

add [their] own insights and [they’ll] put an end to it.” He seems to want readers to take

control of the narrative themselves and take action against the various forms of

oppression we see in Beli’s story. His reference to Dr. Manhattan in the next section,

however, serves as a final reminder that to control a narrative is to claim the authority

speak for the subaltern, an ethical choice Yunior cannot endorse. After he describes his

“dream” that Isis will end the fukú, Yunior describes a panel from Alan Moore’s

Watchmen in which Adrian Veidt asks Dr. Manhattan to validate his actions, claiming, “It

all worked out in the end” (331). Dr. Manhattan responds, “In the end? Nothing ends,

Adrian. Nothing ever ends” (331). His words appear to undo the finality of Isis’s

metaphorical ending of the curse, reminding the reader of his own responsibility to leave

the narrative open. Yunior cannot narrate a final ending of the curse because he has

invited the reader to participate in constructing the narrative.

The ambiguous finality of Yunior’s story is highlighted in his inclusion of literal

blank pages that precede and follow this section. Until this point, Yunior has used blank

pages to signal the end of a chapter or an act, similar to many other novels. Here,

however, he frames his vision of Isis with blank pages (328 and 332), literalizing the

blank pages of Beli’s story and emphasizing the absence of her speech. These gutters

invite the reader to participate in Yunior’s narration of her story in particular and the

novel generally. In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud includes

two comic book panels separated by a gutter: the first shows a man wielding an ax over

another man’s head, and the second shifts to a skyline shot with the word “EEYAA!” in

stark black ink. He writes, “I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but

I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why.

That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style”

(68). In the gutter, the space exists for the reader to take part in the narrative, but this

opportunity comes with the burden of complicity. Likewise, Yunior may have left blank

pages in Beli’s story because he was unable to fill in the information, but our

participation in reading the book makes us “an equal partner in crime known as the

reader” (McCloud 68). In participating in and interrogating Yunior’s narrative, we have

become accomplices in his erasure of Beli’s authentic voice. Yunior’s narration of Beli’s

story emphasizes the páginas en blanco that he cannot fill in, and our own reading of the

story brings closure because we fill in the gaps of silence. With the blank pages that

surround the penultimate section, Yunior hands his narrative to the reader the same way

he hopes to hand it to Isis in the future, hoping that we will finally end the fukú. Still, as

his reference to Dr. Manhattan proves, “nothing ever ends.”

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Within the blank pages, our shared crime of silencing Beli and victims like her

will always exist. As McCloud asserts, “To kill a man between panels is to condemn him

to a thousand deaths” (69). Together with Yunior, we have condemned Beli to eternal

silence. This shared crime places us in the same Watcher/dictator position as Yunior. At

the end of the novel, the reader understands the political and ethical implications of

joining Yunior as a Watcher. Yunior has done his duty as Uatu the Watcher, recording

information about Beli and her place within the larger historical context of Trujillo’s

dictatorship. Uatu the Watcher’s purpose in the comic books is to observe Earth and

record his findings with the purpose of sharing them with fellow Watchers. In Fantastic

Four #13, Uatu’s first appearance, he breaks his oath of non-interference to save the

heroes from the Super Apes. As the years go on, Uatu will interfere in the lives of

humans often to save them from destroying themselves. Like Uatu, Yunior interferes in

Beli’s life with his narration by subsuming her own authentic voice, but he is always

aware that his narration silences Beli’s voice. Just as Uatu failed to keep his vow of non-

interference in the affairs of humans, Yunior fails to give readers the “closed,”

“conclusive” narrative he promised in his introduction and instead reveals the failure of

narrative itself to speak for the subaltern. Rather than try to tell Beli’s story, then, Yunior

draws attention to his narrative failure and prompts readers, his partners in crime, to

question his authenticity and, by extension, the authenticity of all narrative.

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