Summary: The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

A literature course is not the natural habitat for a Public Health major. These individuals are accustomed to graphs, statistics, and some concise stories that exemplify the triumph of science over disease. Issues such as gender, faith, and personal achievement are measured in quantifiable terms and discussed in peer reviewed journals, not novels and poems. Diving into literary works of art was an enjoyable change of pace from equations and experiments. The works that I found to be most artistic and significant were the most candid. Specifically, my favorites were informal, rebellious, and frank in style and language. When a novel or poem uses dense, polite language address an issue, a reader feels disconnected and bored. The most creative, engaging works of the semester were those that were informal in tone. One work that exemplifies this style was The Brief Wondrous

Rejecting accepted sequential organization and supplying extraneous information also add to the casual tone of the novel. Diaz does not tell Oscar’s story in the order of events. Instead, he jumps around. Stories from Oscar’s maternal grandparents’ past take up a substantial amount of the tale. Diving deeply into the story of Oscar’s grandfather and grandmother who have been dead since his mother was a very small child, before Oscar was even thought of, seems a bit ridiculous. But the rambling and tangents serve to give the novel a feeling of casual conversation, like Yunior and the reader are discussing the unfortunate events of the de Leon clan. Like everything else in life, one thing is related to everything else, all woven together. The story of Oscar’s life is just as related to the reign of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic as it is to Yunior’s infidelity, as well as it is to his mother’s teenage years. It all connects and deals with important issues of immigration, family relations, and