Summary: The Brief And Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a bildungsroman is “a novel dealing with one person 's formative years or spiritual education.” In an interview with Slate.com, Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and creative writing professor at MIT, and author of The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao, describes his book as a “textual Caribbean”(O’Rourke). He elaborates on his statement by saying how the work was supposed to be, “Shattered and yet somehow holding together” (O’Rourke). He embeds this concept of a textual Caribbean in The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao through the theme that disjointed occurrences eventually breed clarified understanding. Given the genre of this book as a bildungsroman, Diaz makes evidence for the preceding theme through the epiphanic encounters of the following two characters in The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao: Oscar and Beli. Diaz suggests the theme that disjointed occurrences eventually breed clarified understanding, in his book The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao, through Oscar’s coming-of-age experience. In the beginning of the book, Diaz describes Oscar as an atypical Dominican boy who possesses an apparent disregard for cultural norms. Diaz starts this description by noting how Oscar “never had much luck with

When considering Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a reader must understand that he embodies his idea of a “textual Caribbean” in a theme: disjointed occurrences eventually breed clarified understanding. To clarify, given a character in a bildungsroman, he is inclined to encounter certain experiences that may initially appear to lack coherence. In addition a reader faces a similar inclination to become lost in the disjointed events in the life of the character. The reader must be aware that when the character faces a revelation or epiphanic experience in the story, occurrences that originally seemed incoherent become simplified in the wake of the characters new