KATHERINE WEESE*

T no Eres Nada de Dominicano:

Unnatural Narration and De-Naturalizing
Gender Constructs in Junot Dazs
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
This article offers a reading of Dominican American novelist Junot Dazs The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). A recent development in narrative theory, unnatural narration, illuminates the narrative perspective used in Dazs novel, which
violates traditional narrative conventions for distinctions between first- and thirdperson narrators. The novel also participates in the unnatural in its use of science
fiction and fantasy literature, and in its representation of logically impossible scenarios. Ultimately this process is linked to European colonization and nationalist
dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. However, the unnatural narration lays bare
and in effect denaturalizes gender constructs, which, like all ideologies, frequently
masquerade as natural. The novels unusual, unnatural narrative stance critiques
the definition of masculinity to which the narrator on the surface seems to subscribe,
and thus Dazs novel provides a space for more democratic definitions of masculinity to emerge.
Keywords: Junot Daz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (novel), Dominican
masculinity, unnatural narrative, narrative voice, the fantastic

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybodys always going on about
he wasnt no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots
on his jock. And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck
with the females (how very un-Dominican of him). (Daz, 2007, p. 11)
So begins Junot Dazs narrator Yuniors introduction of the title character in the novel
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Oscar is described as very un-Dominican pre* Department of English, Hampden-Sydney College.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the author, Department of English, P.O. Box
169, Hampden-Sydney College, Hampden-Sydney, VA 23943. Email: kweese@hsc.edu
THE JOURNAL OF MENS STUDIES, VOL. 22, NO. 2, SPRING 2014, 89-104.
2014 by the Mens Studies Press, LLC. All rights reserved. http://www.mensstudies.com
jms.2202.89/$15.00 DOI: 10.3149/jms.2202.89 ISSN/1060-8265 e-ISSN/1933-0251

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cisely because he does not fit traditional definitions of Caribbean masculinity. This article
examines the relationship between the novels exploration of constructions of Dominican
masculinity and the unusual features of the novels narrative voice. In recent years, there has
been a growing interest within the field of narratology in so-called unnatural narrative
that is, narrative voice that defies the conventions of the mimetic contract and resists being
easily categorized according to traditional theories of narrative. Narrative theorists use the
term natural not only to describe modes of fictional narration that do obey the mimetic
contract, but also to refer to events that take place within a fiction that are consistent with
the laws of the natural world. The term natural is also used more generally to describe ideologies of genderindeed, any ideologyinsofar as ideologies masquerade as the natural
state of affairs, when in fact they are constructs. The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores the intersection of these different ways of thinking about naturalness. Because the
narrative voice is so consumed with issues of gender construction, masculinity especially,
it becomes important to explore the relationship between the unnatural features of Yuniors narration and the novels relationship to traditional Dominican masculinity. By calling attention to the unnatural in the narrative theory categories, I argue, the novel
implicitly calls into question the naturalness of socially constructed gender roles: it denaturalizes for the reader the ideology that informs Dominican masculinity.
After opening with a prologue in which the narrator, who is later identified as Yunior, introduces the idea of a fuk or curse that has attached itself to Oscar and his family, the novel
provides a description of the very young Oscars winning ways with women, thereby firmly
establishing from the outset the connection between sexual conquest and traditional Dominican masculinity. But as Oscar enters adolescence, gains a lot of weight, and develops
a consuming interest in science fiction, fantasy, and comic books (so-called nerd genres),
he falls woefully short of the ideal to which he aspires. The rest of the novel details his
quest to lose his virginity, with Yuniorlinking the events of Oscars present family life with
his mother Belicia (Beli) and his sister Lola as well as his college years in New Jersey to
Oscars family history prior to Belis leaving the Dominican Republic. The novel travels
progressively back in time to the story of Oscars grandfather, Abelard, who was jailed and
ultimately killed by the Trujillo regime. Yunior also provides a great deal of information
about Belicias life in the Dominican Republic and the negative effects of the Trujillo regime
on her when she becomes involved with a man known as the Gangster who is married to
Trujillos sister. Eventually revealing that he is Lolas on-again, off-again boyfriend, and that
he has roomed with Oscar at college, Yunior brings the narration back to the present time
frame to describe Oscars life after college and a key period during which Oscar travels to
the Dominican Republic where he becomes involved with a prostitute, Ybon, falling head
over heels in love and finally losing his virginity. Unfortunately, Ybons boyfriend is a corrupt police officer who becomes jealous of Oscars attentions to Ybon and arranges to have
Oscar beaten and killed. The novel ends with Yuniors ruminations on his friendship with
Oscar, his failed relationship with Lola, and with the hope that Lolas daughter Isis will one
day read and learn from Yuniors manuscripts about her multi-generational family history.
As Yunior weaves this story, his narrative also reflects on his own process of education,
particularly his growing self-awareness about the limits of traditional models of Dominican
masculinity.

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OSCAR, YUNIOR, AND HEGEMONIC DOMINICAN MASCULINITY

Writing about Dazs first short story collection Drown, critic John Riofrio (2008) has
explained the principles of gender construction, noting that definitions of what it means to
be a real man, are imposed externally while functioning as social constructs masked as fundamental truths, the natural order of things (p. 24). Riofrio drew on the work of Keith
Nurse and E. Antonio de Moya, who have both authored chapters that appear in the volume
Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities (Reddock, ed., 2004), a volume that numerous of
Dazs commentators have employed in their analyses of his fiction. Dominican psychologist De Moya has made clear that the expectation for Dominican men to conform to a particular definition of manhood begins in childhooda definition that hinges, in part, on
virility. In addition, the work of Peter Simonson on gender and the construction of the self
in the DR is relevant to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Simonson (1994) has observed that men derive prestige from displays of superior virility (p. 133). Indeed, in the
first chapter of Dazs novel, all of Oscars family and friends reinforce for the seven-yearold boy the machismo that pervades the culture. When Oscar is observed kissing sevenyear-old girls, for example, Yunior tells us, Look at that little macho, his mothers friends
said. Que hombre (Daz, 2007, p. 14). Pressures to conform lead young men to become
well-trained subject[s] unconsciously aware of the natural rules of masculinity (Riofrio, 2008, p. 26), so that Oscar, who after the age of seven quickly loses his appeal with
girls and finds himself in his late teen and early adult years unable to get a date, feels himself to be a misfit. When others question his Dominican identity, he tries desperately to conform, trying to polish up what remained of his Dominicanness, tried to be more like his
cursing, swaggering cousins, if only because he had started to suspect that in their Latin
hypermaleness there might be an answer (Daz, 2007, p. 30). Later, in his college years,
one of Oscars friends tells him, T no eres nada de dominicano, but Oscar would insist
unhappily, I am Dominican, I am (p. 180). He becomes suicidal, internalizing his companions definitions of masculinity as virility and questioning his own self-worth when he
fails to measure up. As Keith Nurse (2004) has observed, the social construction of masculinity in effect ensnare[s] men into their own oppression. And because it is mythologizedtaken out of historical context and made natural and eternalit becomes an invisible
force, especially to men (p. 15). But the very self-consciousness of Dazs narrative makes
highly visible this invisible force. By combining the insights of Nurse, De Moya, Simonson and other scholars who write about Caribbean masculinities with literary theorists ideas
about unnatural narration and storytelling conventions that draw attention to the way narratives are constructed and point to the desires that such constructions serve (Richardson,
2011, p. 38) readers can appreciate the ways in which the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao demythologizes dominant versions of Dominican masculinity.
In analyzing the relationship of unusual narrative events and unusual narrative techniques
to the novels treatment of what it means to be a Dominican man, readers must address the
narrator Yuniors complicated relationship to Dominican masculinity. On the one hand, Yunior seems to embrace precisely the traditional ideology of masculinity defined by Levant,
Hirsch, Celentano, Cozza, Hill, and MacEachernet (1992) and summarized by Saez, Casado
and Wade in Factors Influencing Masculinity Ideology among Latino Men (2009):

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the requirement to avoid all things feminine; the injunction to restrict ones emotional life; the emphasis on toughness and aggression; the injunction to be self-reliant; the emphasis on achieving status above all else; non-relational, objectifying
attitudes toward sexuality; and fear and hatred of homosexuals. (p. 117)
As Saez, Casado, and Wade (2009) have pointed out, the literature on masculinity ideology and Latino men, though as yet limited and inconclusive, has presented some evidence
to support speculation that Latino men may endorse more traditionally masculine gender
roles than European American men (p. 117). As if to illustrate his adherence to precisely
these traits, Yunior frequently emphasizes his physical strength, including his ability to
bench press 340 pounds (Daz, 2007, p. 170). He uses incredibly derogatory language to describe the many women with whom he is involved, boasting constantly of his numerous
sexual conquests, and at one point identifying himself as someone who couldnt not get ass,
even when [he] tried (p. 196). In addition, Yunior exhibits clear homophobia and refers to
the dormitory in which Oscar lives as Homo Hall, taking care to distinguish himself from
all the weirdos and losers and freaks and fem-bots who reside there (p. 170). He describes
Oscar as look[ing] like that fat homo Oscar Wilde (p. 180). Yunior restricts his emotional
life in several ways. He once makes an off-hand comment about the lack of affection he had
when he was growing up (p. 185), especially from his father, and the nature of this relationship seems to have influenced Yuniors own relationships with others. He befriends
Oscar at Lolas bidding but supports Oscar in only a limited way and constantly lets him
down, for example failing to visit him in the hospital in the wake of Oscars suicide attempt. He repeatedly hurts Lola, the one woman for whom he seems genuinely to care, by
not being faithful.
As a college student, Yunior is unable to break with cultural codes that define Dominican male sexual identity in these narrow terms. He observes,
What I should have done was check myself into Bootie-Rehab. But if you thought
I was going to do that, then you dont know Dominican men. Instead of focusing on
something hard and useful like, say, my own shit, I focused on something easy and
redemptive.
Out of nowhere, and not in the least influenced by my own shitty stateof course
not!I decided that I was going to fix Oscars life. (Daz, 2007, p. 175)
Attempting to remake Oscar in his own image, Yunior the character effectively avoids confronting the problems that his own adherence to cultural ideals of masculinity has created
for him.1 But at the same time, the Yunior who narrates Oscars and Oscars family story
from some point in the future after Oscars death has undergone some real changes as a re-

1
In an insightful and extended analysis of Yuniors attempt to get Oscar to conform to heteronormative values and of Yuniors inability to confront his own demons, Machado Sez (2011)
has read the novel against the grain of critical consensus that it operates in an oppositional fashion to nationalist dictatorship as embodied in its depiction of the Trujillo regime and the Dominican diasporic community.

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sult of his involvement with the Cabral/de Len family, changes that involve his thinking
about masculinity. His self-conscious language frequently undermines his own adherence
to conventions of traditional Dominican masculinity, and he is certainly, in his narration,
hyper-aware of his own hyper-masculinity as well as that of the Dominican and DominicanAmerican communities in which the novel is set. Because Yunior openly criticizes himself
for perpetuating these pressures in trying to get Oscar to conform to Yuniors own model
of masculinity, his narration has the effect of exposing and critiquing expectations for hegemonic masculinity within the Dominican community.
For example, when Yunior first begins narrating as a character in the story, he admits to
his weakness in getting jumped one night, his big mistake in thinking that because I was
hard, thought Id have no problem walking through the thicket of young guns I saw on the
corner (Daz, 2007, p. 167). His subsequent description of his beat-up state renders him as
Oscars double when Oscar is later savagely beaten in the Dominican Republic by thugs acting on behalf of Yvonnes corrupt police officer boyfriend and reveals the pitfalls of Yuniors
ultra-tough attitude. In addition, Yunior lets on at several points throughout the narrative that
he is himself a closet nerd; his constant belittling of Oscars obsessions with fantasy, science fiction, and role-playing games is a thinly veiled posturing to cover up his own like interests, but on numerous occasions he lets down the veil. For example, he chastises Oscar
for putting a sign up on their dorm room door written in Elvish, but self-consciously calls
attention to his own ability to read Elvish by imploring the reader, in a parenthetical statement, Please dont ask me how I knew this. Please (Daz, 2007, p. 172). In these acts of
revealing himself to be Oscars double, Yunior implicitly questions his own hypermasculinity. He furthermore shows an awareness of having betrayed Oscar emotionally when
he writes, these days I have to ask myself: What hurt him more? That I was never really
his friend, or that I pretended to be? (p. 181). Or very late in the novel, regretting the way
he has treated Lola, Yunior is openly self-critical when he reveals that after their break-up,
I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved and Id finally try to say
the words that could have saved us.
___ ____ ____.
But before I can shape the vowels, I wake up. My face is wet, and thats how you
know its never going to come true. (p. 327)
These lines reveal his vulnerability; his willingness to admit to the reader his unmanly act
of crying belies many of his overt claims to be invulnerable.
UNNATURAL EVENTS AND UNNATURAL MASCULINITY
Beyond the self-consciousness in his narration that undermines his own posturing, Yuniors narrative participates in what recent theorists of narrative term unnatural in two
ways: first, by relating elements within the story that violate the laws of the physical world,
and secondto which I will return shortlyby violating established conventions of narrative voice.2 Narrative theorist Jan Alber (2009) defines an unnatural narrative act in the first
2

See Alber and Heinze (2011, pp. 2-5) for a detailed discussion of these two types of unnaturalness.

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of these ways, as consisting of physically impossible scenarios and events, that is, impossible by the known laws governing the physical world, as well as logically impossible ones,
that is, impossible by accepted principles of logic (p. 80). Others have analyzed the novels
depiction of fantastical events and its relationship to magic realism, as well as its ubiquitous
allusions to the genrescomic books, science fiction, and other fantasy literature (see
Bautista, 2010; Hannah, 2010; Lanzendrfer, 2013; Miller, 2011; Ramrez, 2013; Saldvar,
2011). Moreover, Hannah (2010) commented on Yuniors unusual narrative voice (see also,
Machado Sez, 2011; Miller, 2011; Patteson, 2012). But none has united these ways of considering the novel through the lens of unnatural narrative theory, a framework that helps
readers connect these aspects of the narrative, to show how these features work together to
interrogate hegemonic masculinity in the DR and in the Dominican diasporic community
in which the characters reside in the United States. This interrogation of hegemonic masculinity manifests itself especially in Yuniors incorporation of colonial and national history
in the novel; he engages in self-critique of his own hyper-masculinity through his portrayal
of dictator Rafael L. Trujillo. As we will see, Yuniors discourse on Trujillo becomes intricately bound up not only with the presentation of logically impossible scenarios in the
novelfor example the claim that Trujillo was supernatural, that he was not human (Daz,
2007, p. 245)but also with his self-consciousness about his status as a fiction writer and
with the unnatural features of his narrative voice that defy conventions of first-person narration.
Throughout the novel, Yunior frequently uses the term unnatural to describe Trujillos
superhuman powers to control what is perceived as historical reality in the Dominican Republic, to control political events in his country, and to engage in sexual conquest, also
terming Trujillos regime the worlds first culocracy: If you think the average Dominican guys bad, Yunior explains, Trujillo was five thousand times worse (Daz, 2007, p.
217). Yuniors ubiquitous comparisons of Trujillo to Sauron of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and to comic-book figures and other characters in fantasy novels call attention to the
unreal nature of the hyper-masculine dictator in such a way that they interrogate the presumed naturalness of the conventions of socially constructed Dominican masculinity.
There is not room here to detail these comparisons, which have been thoroughly treated in
other articles. Instead, I concentrate on intersections between magic realist theory and unnatural narrative theory in their explanations of how readers account for the representation
of unnatural events. Alber (2009) has explored the manner in which readers of unnatural narratives come to terms with impossible storyworlds. Three of the five strategies he has
identified have particular relevance to Oscar Wao:
(1) In reading events as internal states, we explain the impossible as pertaining to
interiority. (2) In foregrounding the thematic, we read unnatural scenarios as exemplars of specific themes rather than mimetically motivated occurrences (5) Finally, in frame-enrichment, we considerably stretch our frames to make sense of
the impossible and rethink the domain of the possible. (p. 83)
Dazs comparisons of Trujillo to Sauron, for example, seem clearly to fall into the second category, and readers see Trujillos unnaturalness as thematic commentaries on the
range and extent of his power. In addition to Trujillo being called supernatural, another

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mysterious event involves a golden mongoose that makes several appearances later in the
novel, manifesting itself when characters are in dire need of help such as Beli when she is
beaten nearly to death in the cane fields of the DR, or Oscar when he attempts suicide and
later when he, too, is savagely beaten. This creature speaks with the characters and provides inspiration for them to go on living. The first time he introduces the mongoose, Yunior questions whether or not the mythical creature is real: And now we arrive at the
strangest part of our tale. Whether [it] was a figment of Belis wracked imagination or something else altogether I cannot say (Daz, 2007, p. 149). Readers might then apply Albers
(2009) category of reading the unnatural as an internal state (p. 83); or, if readers accept that
the mongoose is real within the storyworld, not Belis construction, they employ Albers fifth
option, accepting the unnatural beyond real-world possibilities (Alber, 2009, p. 82).
Numerous theorists of magic realism and of narratives of the fantastic have focused on
the readers hesitation in choosing precisely between Albers second and fifth ways of understanding the unnatural described above; it is useful to consider these theories in conjunction with theories of unnatural narratives. While the magic realist novel typically does
not depict hesitation about seemingly supernatural events on the part of the narrator or characters, the novel of the fantastic does. Dazs prologue situates The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao both within and against the Latin American tradition of magic realism. That is,
the reference to Macondo (Daz, 2007, p. 7) explicitly invokes Gabriel Garcia Marquezs
magic realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, while Yuniors disclaimers about the reality of marvelous events such as the appearance of the mongoose or the existence of the
fuk or curse set his narrative apart from the magic realist mode in which the magical is accepted as real with no hesitation expressed by the narrator. Whether or not narrators and
characters experience hesitation in encountering these events, readers do, as Hegerfeldt
(2005) has noted, and as has been suggested by Albers (2009) theories of readers cognitive functions in accounting for the unnatural.
The important point here is not to identify Dazs novel as belonging definitively to the
mode of either magic realism or of the fantastic, but to examine how the incorporation of
fantastical or unnatural events in the story blurs the bounds between the real and the notreal, invoking hesitation in the reader in such a way that the events call attention to and
raise questions about the naturalness of ideological constructs about gender and power
perpetrated by various characters in the novel. Faris (2004) has theorized that in the magic
realist text, precisely because narrators and characters do not experience surprise at seemingly unnatural events, the element of surprise is redirected onto the history we are about
to witness, which constitutes the nasty shock (p. 14). The same dynamic is true even when
Yunior does express surprise or hesitation in his relation of unnatural events. Let us consider
the first unnatural element that appears in the novelYuniors description of the fuk
americanus:
they say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was
the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began;
that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked
open in the Antilles. (Daz, 2007, p. 1)
Yuniors account of the curse that has plagued Dominican history from the time of Admiral Coln and continues to plague Oscar and his family immediately invokes the supernat-

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ural, but it is cast in clearly historical terms. Later in the prologue, fuk becomes quickly
associated with machismo itself: I have a twelve-daughter uncle in the Cibao who believed
that hed been cursed by an old lover never to have male children. Fuk (Daz, 2007, p. 5).
As he goes on to explain how the fuk americanus was also called the fuk of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims (Daz,
p. 1), Yunior reminds readers that conventions of Caribbean masculinity have roots in colonial Europe. Indeed, Connell (2005) has written that
[i]t is a familiar suggestion that Latin American machismo was a product of the interplay of cultures under colonialism. The conquistadores provided both provocation
and model, Spanish Catholicism provided the ideology of female abnegation, and
economic oppression blocked other sources of authority for men. (p. 198)
Ultimately, then, in the context of a historical and political novel like The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao, the manner in which the novel incorporates unnatural events prompts the
reader to question the natural/unnatural status of ideological constructs. Hegerfeldt (2005)
elaborates on this point in her discussion of British author Angela Carter about how Carter
employs the magical/ unnatural for feminist ends, not to promote belief in the supernatural,
but rather to demythologize material human practice (Carter, 1983, p. 38, cited in
Hegerfeldt, 2005, p. 161). The same dynamic operates in Dazs demythologizing conventions of masculinity that are not natural but are constructed by the human practice of European colonization and nationalist dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.
UNNATURAL NARRATIVE VOICE AND THE QUESTION OF AUTHORITY
Dominican psychologist De Moya (2004) has noted that the 193061 dictatorship of
Rafael L. Trujillo was shown as a theatre-state in which hegemonic masculinity (and its inversion) was the star, going on to say that attitudes about masculinity instilled in young men
were the product of an ongoing process of stringent, totalitarian gender work, oriented
towards the construction of a hegemonic male (p. 98). According to John Riofrios analysis of Dazs short story collection Drown, De Moyas choice of the word totalitarian is
particularly well suited in that it implies, via the association of the political, the severity of
the consequences engendered by non-conformity (Riofrio, 2008, p. 26). Within the context
of Dazs novel Oscar Wao, the modifier totalitarian to describe gender work is even
more apt, since Daz connects the historical aspect of his novel, his treatment of the regime
of Rafael Trujillo, with the particular version of Dominican masculinity that the book denaturalizes and critiques. As Daz comments in an interview, Trujillo was so fundamentally
Dominican, and for a Dominican writer writing about masculinity, about dictatorship, power,
hes indispensable (ORourke, 2007, cited in Lpez-Calvo, 2009, p. 80). In addition to
considering Yuniors presentation of Trujillo as a supernatural being, we need also to consider the ways in which Yunior himself participates inand ultimately distances himself
fromTrujillos version of masculinity and his totalitarian authority. Against the totalitarian gender politics of the Trujillo regime, Daz advocates what Michael Kimmel (1996) has
termed democratic manhood, defined as a gender politics of inclusion, of standing up
against injustice based on difference (p. 333). This dynamic plays itself out in the second

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way in which Dazs novel participates in features of unnatural narration: Yuniors impossible narrative position vis--vis the story he tells.
In a consideration of the value of theories of unnatural narrative, Richardson (2011) has
argued that a study of unnatural narrative can foreground experimental techniques developed by oppositional writers, whether feminist, minority, or postcolonial, to carve out different representational practices from those of the dominant culture (p. 38). This statement
raises questions about the relationship between feminist theories of narrative and theories
of unnatural narrative. Feminist narratologist Susan Snaider Lanser (1992) has explained
that while both feminist scholars and narrative theorists place a high premium on the importance of narrative voice, their projects are often at odds with one another insofar as narratologists are usually concerned with formal structures and not with the causes, ideologies,
or social implications of particular narrative practices (p. 4). Her work Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice sought to combine close attention to formal features of narrative voice in womens fiction with a full consideration of the ideological
implications of various forms of narrating voices. Likewise, Robyn Warhol (1999) has
pointed out that in recent years, feminist narratology has begun to focus on gender as
a textual effect and to inquire How does this text construct masculinity and femininity
in and for its reader? (p. 343). Warhols essay appeared in a volume edited by David Herman (1999) titled Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis in which Herman wrote in his introduction that new models of narrative theory stand in a more or less
critical and reflexive relation to the structuralist tradition, borrowing more or less extensively from the analytic heritage they aim to surpass (p. 1) and tend to be attentive both
to the text and to the context of stories (p. 8), including the exploration of ways of living
out or contesting a more or less implicitly gendered response to certain kinds of narrative
structures (pp. 8-9). Richardsons (2011) recent statement about unnatural narration and oppositional writing made an important gesture, since unnatural narrative theory, even as it distances itself from classical narratology, has perhaps still tended toward the structuralist pole
of narrative inquiry at the expense of the ideological. At the same time, however, the work
of theorists of unnatural narration raises important connections between unusual features of
narrative voice and the representation of unnatural or fantastic events in ways that the work
of feminist narratologists has not fully explored (Weese, 2008). Ultimately, theories of the
fantastic and magic realism, feminist narratology, and unnatural narratology can all three
mutually inform one another as intersections among these bodies of literary theory provide
a lens through which to examine how texts that employ the unnaturalboth unnatural
events and unnatural narrative voicescritique the ideology of gender. Novels like The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao invite exploration of how the text constructs masculinity in particular through the unusual features of its narrative voice.
Narrative theorist Heinze (2008) has carefully delineated a variety of first-person paraleptic narrators, a fundamentally unnatural category since this type of first-person narrator has knowledge beyond the bounds of ordinary human consciousness. Heinzs category
of local paralepsis perhaps best describes the narration of The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao in terms of the novels relationship to fantastic events, since for the most part,
the non-natural elements (the curse, the golden mongoose) are contained within the natural frame, or unusual/unrealistic features of the narrative voice are contained within a narrative that is otherwise plausible, a basically natural and realistic world, and in fact a

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historically recognizable one (p. 286). Though the novel makes constant references to science fiction and fantasy, it does so in such a manner that it differentiates itself from the
genre fiction it uses so extensively to frame its historical commentary. While it incorporates magical elements in the pervasive fuk, it clearly locates the source of the fuk not in
the realm of the magical or supernatural but in the historical world of colonialism, nationalism, and political domination, just as it locates the zafa, or counterspell, in knowledge of
history, in the act of writing to break silences. So the majority of the story told is a plausible one, although the manner in which it is told remains unnatural or implausible according to conventional theories of narrative. As a result, attention is cast less on violations of
physical laws (Heinze, 2008, p. 286) than on violations of narrative conventions.
Traditional narrative theory makes a clear-cut distinction between first- and third-person
narration, stipulating that first-person narrators cannot report the internal thoughts of other
characters since they cannot logically have access to that information. Following the work
of Grard Genette (1980), these theories also operate on the assumption that the homo- or
heterodiegetic status of the narrator is clear from a novels outsetthat is, the narrator is either someone who inhabits the story world such as a character-narrator, or someone who exists outside that world and reports on it from a privileged perspective. But as narrative
theorists such as Brian Richardson (2000) have made clear, these distinctions are increasingly blurred in self-conscious fashion: This formulation excludes precisely the kinds
of play with voice, level, and frame that is typical of though not limited to postmodernism.
A contemporary author may well decide to use a narrative posturethat problematizes
the opposition Genette considers foundational (p. 33). And this is precisely what Daz has
chosen to do in creating his narrator Yunior.3 Although Yunior uses the pronoun I from the
outset of the novel, his relationship to the characters whose tale he tells remains unclear
until nearly half way through the novel when he reveals himself to be Lolas boyfriend and
Oscars roommate, thus blurring the bounds between the homo- and hetero-diegetic narrator. Dazs novel also blurs the boundaries between first-person and third-person narration,
insofar as Yunior has access to far more information than he logically should; often his narration focalizes information through the perspective of characters other than himself, in violation of narrative theorist Rimmon-Kenans common-sense observation that a character
who is part of the represented world cannot know everything about it (2002, p. 80, as
cited in Heinze, 2008, p. 280). In focalizing his first-person narration through the perspective of other characters, Yunior becomes, in effect, a first-person omniscient narrator, a category defined in the world of narratology as unnatural. According to Richardson (2011),
an unnatural narrative develops new narratological patterns that depart from the conventions described by classical narratology and that produce a defamiliarization of the
basic elements of narrative (p. 34, emphasis in original). By self-consciously calling attention to questions of authority and power in the construction of narratives, to the questions
of who gets to tell a story, how reliable that voice is, and from whence the voice has gleaned

3
Miller (2011) has made a similar observation, terming Yunior an impossibly homodiegetic
narrator (p. 93). With a primary interest in Dazs use of science fiction references within Oscar
Wao, Miller has speculated about how readers account for Yuniors narrative stance but ultimately has left it to others to attempt to pin Yunior down on the narratological level (p. 109n5).

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information, Daz by extension defamiliarizes and de-naturalizes cultural constructions of

gender, revealing them to be authored by particular voices with vested interests rather than
simply to be the natural order of things (Riofrio, 2008, p. 24).
Among these departures are Yuniors detailed renderings of Oscars experience as if from
the perspective of a third-person narrator in Chapter I of the novel, set in the years before
Yunior ever met Oscar, and including more detail than Oscar could, realistically, have told
his college roommate many years after the events. In addition, in Chapter II, we learn of
Belis history in the DR, including daydreams that she would not realistically have shared
with any other character in the story (Daz, 2007, p. 87), and intimate details about her time
with her lover the Gangster, in spite of Belis silence on the matter and other folks lingering
unease when it comes to talking about the regime (p. 119). Later, in Chapter Five, Yunior
reports details of Abelards imprisonment and death even though Abelard died alone in
prison and could not have related this information to anyone. The list goes on. What are the
implications of these violations of the range of knowledge of a first-person narrator? To answer this question, critics have turned to a crucial footnote in the novel, in which Yunior
queries,
What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway?... Rushdie claims that tyrants and
scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think thats too simple; it lets writers off
pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same
with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like. (Daz, 2007, p. 97, emphasis in original)
This statement openly invites readers to compare Dazs narrator with the infamous dictator in the ways that they construct reality. In the prologue, Yunior notes Trujillos accomplishment of the forging of the Dominican peoples into a modern state (p. 3), and as
Hannah (2010) has noted, the term forge suggests both a creation and a forgery, a counterfeit (p. 503). Similarly, Yunior address how he has occasionally changed details of his
story when he talks about revisions of his drafts (e.g., p. 132). In addition, of course, Yuniors ubiquitous posturing about his own sexual prowess also clearly establishes him as a
double of Trujillo. Machado Sez (2011) and Patteson (2012) have both read Yuniors virtuoso narrative as a dictatorial act, an exercise in authority and control, pointing to the omniscient features of his narration. Machado Sez has found his frequent use of footnotes to
contribute to his guise of objectivity (p. 538). While she has observed that the footnotes
become less frequent after Yunior finally reveals his name and his relationship to the characters whose story he tells, she nonetheless has found his narration after this point to be no
less authoritative in policing notions of masculinity and in suppressing Oscars queer Otherness (p. 524) than it was before Yunior revealed himself (p. 540). But theories of unnatural narration provide another way to read Yuniors narrative act.
In fact it is in the prologue that he reveals his vested interest in the story, undermining any
pretense of narrative objectivity when he speaks in the first person and when he writes that
the particular fuk story he is about to tell happens to be the one thats got its fingers around
my throat (Daz, 2007, p. 6), going on to identify the narrative that follows as My very
own counterspell (p. 7). These revelations immediately relay Yuniors subjective interest
in the story, and though his narrating I makes infrequent appearances until Part II of the

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novel, he references himself as we quite frequently in the footnotesa clearly Dominican voice that has a particular point of view on Dominican politics and the Trujillato, a
voice that also employs comic-book knowledge and that establishes the fantastical nature
of Trujillo and his machismo. Yunior possesses a highly distinctive voice; has a self-proclaimed subjective relationship to the story (though readers do not know the details yet of
this relationship); expresses awareness of historical texts as participating in the conventions
of fictional narratives; and makes frequent unnatural forays into the minds of other characters when he narrates information that a first-person narrator cannot logically have access
to. All of these features of his narration intersect in such a way that they call explicit attention to the constructed nature of narrative knowledge and of historical accounts that reinforce underlying ideologies of gender. They work in conjunction with the novels invocation
of magic realism and the concomitant hesitation involving characters, narrators and readers attempts to sort out codes and determine the reality status of events in a story. In this
capacity, Dazs complicated novel that combines unnatural events, an unnatural range of
narrative knowledge, and an accounting of actual, historical events calls to mind
Hegerfeldts (2005) analysis of magic realist fictions critical inquiry into the practice of
historiography, in which she has argued that
works of fiction emphasize how historical knowledge can never be absolute, but,
being full of gaps usually concealed by the historians acts of construction, is at best
partial and always provisional. They further show how the historical account, being
told from a certain point of view, is never disinterested, but servesat least potentiallyto uphold existing power structures. (p. 175)
Yuniors violations of natural narrative acts, when this highly invested first-person narrator adopts the narrative perspective of an omniscient narrator, call attention to rather than
mask his subjectivity and his own acts of narrative construction. And because the narrative
of Oscars life centers on his quest to fulfill definitions of conventional Dominican manhood
while the other characters stories likewise revolve around expectations for performing culturally sanctioned gender roles, Yuniors narration implies a deep awareness of a social constructivist viewpoint and of the performative nature of hegemonic masculinity, as well as
of his own role in subscribing to and perpetuating cultural myths about gender. As such, Yuniors narration intersects not only with theories of magic realism but also with feminist
narratology. As Lanser (1992) has observed of the feminist novels she analyzed, as they
strive to create fictions of authority, these narrators expose fictions of authority as the Western novel has constructed it, perhaps re-establishing it even in the act of contesting it (p.
8, emphasis in original). But importantly, Dazs narrative also points to alternative masculinities by means of Yuniors unnatural narrative technique.
As Yunior progresses further into this story, delving into the past events that led to Oscars
grandfather being disappeared by the Trujillato and continuing with the Patterson, New Jersey story of Oscars life in the United States, his narrative increasingly challenges the very
claims he has made in his footnote about writers and dictators. His claims about the limits
of his own knowledge increase in frequency, in spite of the fact that as a first-person narrator, he has access to far more information about characters internal thoughts than he logically should. Ultimately, his manner of breaking silences by telling this oppositional story

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involves a strategy of using silences strategically to distance himself from stereotypical Dominican masculinity, especially as it is embodied in the figure of Trujillo. In Hegerfeldts
(2005) terms, Yunior simply refuses to fill in gaps through his own constructions and calls
explicit attention to their existence. Yuniors self-consciousness increasingly manifests itself in the pginos en blanco (p. 149)the blank pages of his narrationin such statements as which is to say if youre looking for a full story, I dont have it (Daz, 2007, p.
243). Such disclaimers are a key means by which Yunior dissociates himself from the power
structures of the Trujillo regime and, as Hannah (2010) has stated, maintains his freedom
from the onus of telling the definitive, authoritative version of Oscars history and Dominican history (p. 501).
Yuniors preoccupation with these two very different male figures in his storyTrujillo
and Oscarillustrates two principals of Latin American masculinity. First, as Riofrio (2008)
has pointed out, the first [constant in the manifestation of masculinity in Latin America]
is the persistent centrality of sexual conquest in notions of real masculinity (p. 25); and the
second, described by De Moya (2004), is that
homosocial relations among men are experienced as competitive gendered relations
in terms of domination-subordination, at least at the definitory stage of new dyadic
relationships, where they establish, probably on an unconscious basis, who is the
male (leader, initiator) and who is the female (follower) among them. [E]ach
mans positioning in the dyad will be dependent on the power he displays in the interaction. (p. 78)
In his interactions with Oscar, Yunior assumes the upper hand, establishing himself as the
dominant male leader whom the effeminate Oscar is supposed to emulate. But as we have
seen, Oscar and Yunior are doubled through their interest in nerd genres and by being described in their badly beaten states, a doubling that calls into question who is dominant,
who subordinate in this dyad, since these admissions to some extent other and feminize
Yunior, revealing him to be more like Oscar that he sometimes admits, rather than remaking Oscar in his own image of Dominican hypermaleness. In fact, Oscar has earlier influenced Yuniors writingboth study creative writing at Rutgerswhen Yunior, as a result
of his interactions with Oscar, devotes more time to his craft and writes a story that impresses his instructor because it doesnt contain a single shooting or stabbing in the whole
story (p. 196). In the novels closing, Yuniors own textThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao itselfmirrors Oscars writing project on his last visit to the DR, the project that preoccupied him before he is killed: For twenty-seven days he did two things: he researchedwrote and he chased [Ybon] (p. 317).4 It is suggested that Oscar produces a manuscript
similar to that of his grandfather, Abelard, an expos of political corruption and its relationship to the fuk that haunts the island, and that Oscars text, like Abelards is suppressed.
Yunior fully admits that his knowledge is partial and conjectural, but importantly, Oscars
textsthose he sent back to the U.S. and the spirit of those he may have written but that
never materializeare carefully guarded by Yunior and preserved for Lolas daughter Isis,
4

In a critique of the novels ending, Machado Sez (2011) has focused on the ways in which
Yunior reinforces heteronormative masculinity by writing of Oscars losing his virginity to Ybon
but has not addressed the implications of Oscars second preoccupation, his writing.

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the product of her marriage years after her involvement with Yunior has ended. The preservation of Oscars research and the text Yunior himself has produced become the zafa or
counterspell to the fuk, which has been associated with traditional Dominican masculinity. Oppositional writing functions as one of the barrier shields (Daz, 2007, p. 329) against
the forces of totalitarianism, including what De Moya (2004) has termed totalitarian gender work (p. 98).
In his footnote about writers and dictators, as well as in his constant boasting of his sexual prowess, Yunior vies with Trujillo. But when Yunior proclaims the limits of his own
knowledge of the story he writes, he strategically distances himself from the omniscient
power of Trujillo as author of his regime and of a particular version of Dominican history,
and also from his dominant position as teller of Oscars tale. Yunior, in his authorial mode,
is very much what Lanser (1992) terms a narrator who possess overt authoriality (p. 17,
emphasis in the original) and who engages in extrarepresentational acts: reflections, judgments, generalizations about the world beyond the fiction, direct addresses to the narratee, comments on the narrative process, allusions to other writers and texts (pp. 16-17).
While for the female narrators Lanser has analyzed such acts have usually meant transgressing gendered rhetorical codes (pp. 17-18), Yunior recognizes the extent to which such
narrative acts coincide with traditional gender codes for men, particularly Trujillos fictions
of authority, to borrow Lansers phrase (1992, p. 8). Hence he increasingly emphasizes
the limits of his narratorial powers, which he has earlier flaunted through his first-person
omniscient stance and by partially masking his own position as a homodiegetic narrator
and assuming the guise of a heterodiegetic, authorial narrator. He thereby implicitly critiques the gender work of the totalitarian regime and allows for the emergence of other
masculinities against the hegemonic hyper-masculinity so predominantly displayed by the
male characters in the novel, revealing it to be unnatural. His narrative thus shifts from
an emphasis on homosocial competition (De Moya, 2004; Simonson, 1994) in terms of
hegemonic features of Dominican masculinity to an emphasis on questioning the very terms
of the competition itself. In a variety of complicated ways, the unnatural features of Yuniors narration serve this de-mythologizing project, so that by the end of his unusual narration, Yunior has challenged the hegemony he once seemed to embrace. In place of the
colonial, the nationalist and the totalitarian, he has offered a far more nuanced and democraticto borrow Michael Kimmels term (1996)vision of manhood.

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