Dominican Fantasies, Written and Unwritten: The use of science fiction in the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Juan Diaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao details the life of an overweight Dominican boy who has aspirations of being a romantic hero that are continually thwarted by his great size and unattractive physical appearance. However, one of the dominant themes of the book is that appearances can deceive. Despite the fact that he is ugly on the outside, Oscar has a beautiful soul. His inner life is at odds with his outer life. One way in which Oscar deals with this is by escaping into a world of fantasy novels and characters. Diaz's coming-of-age novel is thus very much a book 'about' other books, just as much as it is a book about a man's life. Its postmodern nature is clear in the sense that the novels and cultural myths to which it is responding are just as powerful and important to Oscar as the actual, exterior narrative thread of Oscar's life.

This is manifested in the way that Oscar's reading choices challenge stereotypes, both of what it means to be a stereotypical 'nerd' and what it means to be Latino. The common cultural stereotype of the Latino man is someone who is not particularly intellectual and acts as a 'player.' Oscar is at best able to function as a 'player' only in science fiction role-playing, not in the field of romance. Oscar's persona also contradicts the common stereotype of what a typical science fiction 'geek should look like. He is Latino, despite the fact that science fiction tends to be dominated by a fanbase of white males. Oscar decries this and tries to defy it, just as he tries to defy his overweight body when...

"He collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like Doctor Who and Blake's 7…he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like 'indefatigable' and 'ubiquitous'" (Diaz 20-22).
Oscar even dresses up as Doctor Who one Halloween but in the eyes of the boys who see him he looks more like the gay, overweight author Oscar Wilde than the British science fiction hero Doctor Who. The fact that Oscar defines such stereotypes means, in the eyes of some, that he should not exist. "Tu eras nada de dominaco…Who the hell had ever met a Domo like that" (Diaz 180). In the eyes of other Dominican boys, Oscar is a non-person, a kind of living 'fictional character' because his interests and his physical presence are so challenging to all available cultural constructions of masculinity. This suggests that Diaz's book is just as much about writing itself as it is about Oscar. Literature comes to define Oscar's life, but very often the available 'ways of being in the world' offered by literature do not fully comprise the reality of human existence. Oscar is far more interesting than either science fiction genre stereotypes or stereotypes of how masculine Dominicans should behave. "Diaz defines himself by his cultural dualism and yet he avoids the reductive tag of 'ethnic' writer because of his deep understanding of language -- not just Spanish and English, but the way that a diaspora's combination of the two creates another reality altogether" (Lingam 2008).

Of…