Summary: The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

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In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot DÍaz makes use of his vast knowledge of various other texts to make entertaining references throughout the novel. Many of these references are of the superhero, anime or fantasy genres which have a fairly specific list of tropes that are distinctive to their respective genres. This use of intertextuality takes readers' expectations of these familiar genres and breaks them by creating a non-traditional hero, ambiguous characters and an ending that defies typical convention which creates a more realistic story. DÍaz uses Oscar as the hero of the story despite the fact that he differs greatly from the archetypal heroes of the other texts mentioned in the novel. Yunior himself expresses his disbelief…show more content…
He creates ambiguity with his characters that veers away from the black and whiteness that many characters of superhero or anime genres follow. Instead of being a character representing goodness and justice or evil and destruction, the characters of the novel can have some of each. Yunior is a simple example of this as he is described as the typical Dominican man because he is player and is all macho but he also likes some of the more nerdy things that Oscar likes, who is always being told how un-Dominican he is. he is a more complicated character because of this because he stands by while his friends pick on Oscar even though he relates to him in this small way and sometimes goes out of his way to help him out. Female characters like Lola and Beli are also shown to be more complex. Lola is almost like Oscar's second mother in the way she looks out for him which makes her seem like the good girl but some of her actions show her as the opposite like when she runs away from home or breaks Max's heart and sleeps with a man for money leading her to admit that "[she] ended up being really stupid" (206). Beli is shown as the heartless mother who abuses her daughter but the reader also gets a glimpse of her as she is growing up and is locked in a chicken cage with terrible burns. DÍaz creates central characters that are not simply villainous for the sake of being villainous just as
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