The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

According to Yunior, being a first-generation Dominican American in the late 20th century means navigating a series of cultural incongruities. These incongruities arise out of the fact that, unlike earlier generations of immigrants to America, safe plane travel and more effective international communication options make it easier than ever to remain connected to one’s homeland. With one foot in America and one foot in the Dominican Republic, Oscar, Yunior, and Lola all take different approaches in shaping and modulating their identities.

Oscar has the most difficult time with finding this identity. With no male guardian or big brother on whom to model his behavior, Oscar fails to fit into either American or Dominican paradigms of conventional masculinity. He copes with his loneliness by diving into what was then a fringe subculture of comic books and tabletop role-playing games, further alienating himself from his peers, who frequently question whether Oscar is Dominican at all. This reaction is especially tragic given the immense suffering Oscar’s family experienced as a result of living in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era. If anyone has a claim to Dominican identity, it is Oscar, yet he is repeatedly denied this claim because of the way he looks, the way he talks, and his utter failure to live up to expectations of masculinity, Dominican or otherwise. In turn, the White students at Rutgers-New Brunswick reject him because he is too Dominican.

On the surface, Yunior navigates these fraught social and racial dynamics with far more ease. His father and big brother may never have given him love, but they did model the kind of hyper-sexualized masculinity that is socially acceptable and even expected in Dominican males. Again and again, however, this masculinity is exposed as a mere front masking deep insecurities. Yunior feel threatened whenever his dominance is challenged, as when Oscar refuses to continue jogging with him or when Oscar successfully befriends Jenni after she rejected Yunior. Underneath the masculine pose, Yunior is an empty shell of a man, incapable of intimacy, and thus any challenge to his manhood is an existential threat.

Lola is perhaps most successful at moving between worlds and modulating her speech and behavior depending on the situation. A master code-switcher, she can alternate between what White people consider “correct” English, Dominican American slang, and what Yunior calls “perfect stuck-up Spanish” (168). Ironically, Lola is also the one who most cleanly severs cultural ties with the Dominican Republic. After the Dominican government fails to bring charges against the capitán and his conspirators, Lola vows never to return to the Dominican Republic, lamenting, “Ten million Trujillos is all we are” (324).

The struggle of modulating one’s identity as a Dominican American is perhaps best represented by Yunior’s description of a relatively minor character: Ana Obregón, Oscar’s first major love interest in college. Of Ana, he writes:

She was this peculiar combination of badmash and little girl [...] there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks, that there existed a third Ana, a hidden Ana who determined what mask to throw up for what occasion but who was otherwise obscure and impossible to know (34).

In this framework, the mandates required by various cultural expectations—whether toughness or nerdiness, passion or propriety—are merely masks. An individual’s true identity is the internal mechanism that decides which masks to put on and when.