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Foreshadowing
Book 1, Preface
Explanation and Analysis:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a contemporary novel that borrows elements from many forms. The novel has qualities of a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. Yunior, the narrator and writer, follows Oscar from childhood into adulthood as he matures and steps into the world. But unlike many bildungsromans, the novel ends with Oscar’s early death. He barely lives past the point of maturity, meaning that the reader is not able to picture him living a successful life with the lessons he’s learned from growing up.
At the same time, the novel is structured like a mock-historical biography. It includes formal features, like footnotes, that are more typical of works of nonfiction than of novels. Yunior attempts to trace the historical, cultural, and familial forces that shaped Oscar's life and death.
Additionally, Díaz incorporates elements of magical realism, which are characteristic of much Latin American literature. This is most relevant with fukú, or the curse. Like much magical realism, the curse exists on the line between actual magic and psychological interpretations. The novel never determines whether fukú is a literal magical curse or whether it is a way to refer to and understand the political forces that have systemically harmed Oscar’s family.
Lastly, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao engages with the tropes of the genre fiction that Oscar loves. In the preface, Yunior writes of Oscar,
He was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He’d ask: What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?
This suggests that Oscar—and, as an extension, Yunior—understood the story of his own life to be unfolding in conversation with the science fiction and fantasy that he was reading.
Related Themes:
