“So this is what everybody’s talking about! Diablo! I only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!” The positive affirmation of Oscar’s life well-spent concludes the novel. Fittingly encompassing his optimism in the wake of event that transpired throughout the novel. Curse or not, Oscar ultimately achieves what he had yearned for the entire novel, despite the violence and misfortune of decades spent in his family. He finally earned himself not only a woman to have sex with but one to be intimate to, and Diaz leaves us to conclude whether his fate was Fuku or Zafa, “You’ll have to decide for yourself.” It’s the open-ended finale that reinforces Yunior’s purpose of creating his own Zafa with this story.
As for the reader’s part, though not everything resolves itself, there is no happy ending in the traditional sense after all (not even Oscar’s self-proclaimed “cure to what ails us” is able to reach Lola), there is no denying the efficiency with which the story was weaved together. Oscar ultimately represents another one of the faceless victims that show the repercussions of Trujillo’s dictatorship generations away from their origin. And Diaz brilliantly shows these consequences through a creative blend of magic realism and the more harsh truths that are present in the real world. In a way that best reflects how family and tradition can both protect and harm an individual.
I enjoyed the novel, though its endless allusions to less conventional works of literature may do it more harm than good. By possibly alienating a group of reader’s Diaz only risks losing Yunior’s Zafa to an audience that isn’t there.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. NY: Riverhead Books. 2007. Print.
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