Summary Of The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

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At stake in this paper is a question at the center of many readers’ (or at the very least, one Judah’s) mind while reading The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao: despite his status as title character, is Oscar really the main character of this story? Ostensibly, he is, considering the bulk of the novel consists of Yunior chronicling his former roommate’s odd and abbreviated existence. Yet Oscar often feels absent from his own story, too caught up in his hobbies and hopeless romantic ways to make his own destiny. For much of the novel, he’s just a sad sack wasting away in his room, using fiction as a means of escape from expectations he can never live up to, a position that hardly lends itself to action and self-determination. By the time he’s …show more content…
One would hope to see Oscar rally from the doldrums of high school and grow and mature as both a person and a character as he steps into college. That unflattering description is on Page 20. Oscar barely even gets another 30 pages of failure before he “had buried himself in the college version of what he’d majored in all throughout high school: getting no ass.”, and the narrative instead shifts to his sister Lola’s present, which is inexorably tied to their mother Beli’s soiled past. Save for a few chance appearances that only serve to reinforce his pathetic status, with one particularly embarrassing moment causing Lola to remark “That was my brother for you. This is why everyone in the world hated his guts.” By the time the spotlight returns to him hundreds of pages later, Oscar already feels like an
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