the brief wondrous life of oscar wao by junot díaz

In the story, the matriarch Belicia is the immigrant that bridges the Dominican Republic with the United States in the novel. He is no longer in his country, yet is also not a part of the new country. An immigrant is an outsider of his own country as well as in the new country. Like the theme of the individual and the nation, Oscar as the outsider parallels the immigrant as the outsider. Oscar is the outsider in the novel mostly due to his nerdiness, his intelligence, and his grotesque physical appearance. The prescribed content of the novel is the daily lives of the characters with a focus on their love lives but the undercurrent of the novel is the role the official/state plays in the characters lives via political control as well as supernatural influence.

The individual and the nation can also be looked at as the quotidian versus the official. Even Oscar becomes involved in the personal life of a member of the Policía Nacional, and is thus symbolically involved with the state, much the same way that his mother and his grandfather were involved. Some of the characters’ lives (Belicia, Abelard, La Inca) operate within Trujillo’s regime, parallel with it and usually involved in it, politically, romantically or sexually. The importance of the individual is stressed as well. The nation is sometimes represented in the individual the epigraph emphasizes this with Derrick Walcott’s words “Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” Although the characters living in the United States are physically separated from their country of origin, they still feel a strong connection to it. His narration is a mix of United States popular culture and Dominican history.

Yunior, the narrator, provides the eyes through which the readers see. The novel focuses on the viewpoint of diaspora from the Dominican Republic. Buy Study Guide The Individual and the Nation

The brief wondrous life of oscar wao by junot díaz