The narrative voices and their impacts in The fantastic brief life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz

Abstract

This article aims to understand the narrative elements in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican writer, Junot Díaz, as well as observing how the metafictional concept applies to Oscar's narrator and friend, Yunior. The narrative presented by Yunior holding traces of an autobiographical profile is divided into three acts and focuses on the life of the American teenager of Dominican ancesctry, Oscar, his sister Lola and his mother Hypatía Belicia Cabral under the fukú, an alleged curse that Léon's family has been around for generations and leads them to suffer aggressions under the Trujillo’s dictatorship in Dominican Republic and under the country's macho culture. In order to elucidate questions, we rely on the concepts of metafiction by the authors Linda Hutcheon (1980, 1991) and Wladimir Krysinski (2005), as well as on the methods of theorists such as Tzvetan Todorov (1970), Gilda Neves da Silva Bittencourt (1999) and Cândida Vilares Gancho (1997). Seeking to elucidate the proposed theme, the narrators according to Ligia Leite will be analyzed in her book O Foco Narrativo (1985). Finally, Norman Friedman's (1967) typology will be presented to raise the main questions to discuss about the narrator. This work has recognized the narrators Yunior and Lola as being distinct and how their positions reflect in the construction of the novel, as well as demonstrate how the narrator Yunior is supported by the theoretical assumptions of the metanarrative and show how this metanarrative concept is essential in understanding the narrators in the novel.