A Study of How Yunior Hides from Reality as Highlighted in Junot Diaz's Book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, crosses boundaries between truth and fantasy. Junot Díaz take the reader through a complex story narrated through many voices while supplying the reader with many facts and references, but also embedding magic and myth to the point where the reader starts to question and wonder what’s real and what’s not. One such narrator that often blurred the line between reality and myth was Yunior. Yunior often used a specific figure to distort our concept of reality, and this figure was a Golden Mongoose. The Golden Mongoose is a being that blurs the line between fiction and fantasy. This figure comes at times when nobody can really identify what it is whether it be in a dream, time of intoxication, or when one is on the brink of death. Each time the Golden Mongoose comes in contact with a character in the novel they are not fully conscious with normal reality, allowing Yunior to further divulge and amplify the combination of magic and real life.

Throughout the novel we learn that although Yunior seems like the cool macho guy that gets all the girls, he also has an obsession or fixation on history and fantasy. He drops reference after reference from Marvel comic books, Lord of the Rings, and even knows how to read elvish, while at the same time giving us lessons on the history of the Dominican Republic. With that in mind there’s no wonder why Yunior would want to put a supernatural spin on his narration of the lives of the De Leon family. We see Yunior distort reality from fiction for the first time when he is telling Beli’s story. Yunior depicts the Mongoose as a sort guardian angel that tries to protect and save members of the De Leon family. After Beli has been kidnapped, beaten to the brink of death, and left for dead in the cane fields she comes in contact with the Golden Mongoose. Here is a description of their encounter. “So as Beli was flitting in and out of life there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden eyes and black pelt…you have to rise. My baby, Beli wept. Mi hijo precioso. Hypatía, your baby is dead…You have to rise now or you’ll never have the son or the daughter. What son? She wailed. What daughter? The ones who wait…you have to follow.”(149). This passage is really interesting because Yunior allows the Mongoose to have a full conversation with Beli, making it hard to depict if the Mongoose is real or not since Beli talked with it, and it helped to save her life. The Mongoose is definitely not an evil or malignant figure because it instills Beli with hope to fight and survive so that she can continue to live and eventually have her children. Had the Mongoose not showed up, Beli may not have had the hope and willpower to continue on since she was in so much pain, her baby was dead, and her lover had abandoned her. What I also found interesting was that the Mongoose knew the future. The Mongoose told Beli that she would never have her son and daughter if she didn’t rise, furthering the implication that the Mongoose has supernatural powers. The Mongoose continues to help Beli by guiding her out of the cane fields to a road where she eventually get picked up and saved by a band of musicians. “But before Beli lost hope she heard the creature’s voice. She (for it had a woman’s lilt) was singing! In an accent she could not place Maybe Venezuelan, Maybe Columbian. Sueno, sueno, sueno, como tú te llamas…Sometimes she saw the creature’s chabine eyes flashing through the stalks. Yo me llamo sueno de la madrugada.”(150). This passage turned my thinking over to where and when the Mongoose appears. The Mongoose kept repeating the word sueno, which in Spanish means dream or sleep. This connected me back to how Yunior allows this figure to only exist in a dream-like trance where you are caught in the middle, rather than normal consciousness.

In this next piece of evidence, Yunior did something that I didn’t quite understand. Oscar had fallen in love with La Jablesse but she started hanging out with another guy and soon their relationship was over. Oscar got really depressed and ended up getting very drunk with Yunior. Eventually Yunior leaves but Oscar keeps drinking and becomes reckless, leaving his dorm and heading for the train tracks. With jumping off the bridge and on to the train tracks on his mind, Oscar encounters the Mongoose. “Closed his eyes (or maybe he didn’t) and when he opened them there was something straight out of Ursula Le Guin standing by his side. Later, when he would describe it he would call it the Golden Mongoose, but even he knew that wasn’t what it really was. It was very placid, very beautiful. Gold-limned eyes that reached through you, not so much in judgment or reproach, but something far scarier. They stared at each other-it serene as a Buddhist, he in total disbelief-and then the whistle blew again and his eyes snapped open (or closed) and it was gone.”(190). This passage is very different from the first in the sense of the interaction between the Mongoose and in this case Oscar. The Mongoose didn’t say anything to save Oscar from his suicide attempt. The Mongoose only reveals itself to Oscar for a moment long enough for him to observe it, but not long enough for him to analyze it. In Beli’s encounter with the Mongoose, they actually have a conversation and the Mongoose seems to have a pretty straight-forward motive of saving Beli. With Oscar the Mongoose’s motives aren’t quite clear and that was curious to me. Further thinking connected me back to Yunior and his role in making the Mongoose so mysterious. In an interview between Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, Diaz says that “dictators, no matter from what side of the globe they hail, tend to recognize the power of word magicians, which is why they so thoroughly seek to control, negate, or exterminate the narrative competition” (Diaz). If Yunior had incorporated the voice of the Mongoose, he wouldn’t have had control of the dream and in turn control of the reader. If he had had Oscar and the Mongoose have a conversation it wouldn’t have resonated as strongly because the reader would still be wondering if this being is real or just some type of magic. By keeping the encounter short and silent Yunior pushes the readers mind over the boundary of reality for just a moment. Another aspect I found really interesting was the fact that Oscar, like when his mother encountered the Mongoose, was also in a dream-like trance since he was under the influence of alcohol. His eyes were open (or closed) which makes me think of when people try to keep their eyes open but they close, then open again, then close, which is as close as it gets to “dreaming” while being awake. I think Yunior provided the reader with this idea of Oscar’s eyes being open (or closed) to leave the details that he is providing up for interpretation. By saying the Oscars eyes could have been opened, or closed, means that he isn’t sure that what he is saying is one hundred percent accurate, that maybe some parts need to be interpreted and that’s where Yunior cleverly finds ways to sneak in his love for fantasy.

In this last piece of evidence, Yunior decides to tell us about Oscar’s final encounter with the Mongoose. Oscar comes in contact with the Mongoose again after he has been beaten to death by the Captain’s men. Like his mother years ago, he was left for dead in the cane fields and was very close to dying. Had it not been for Clives, a family friend, following the goons to where they dropped Oscar, nobody would have known he was there. Clives follows a mysterious singing voice and with an accompanying gust of wind finds Oscar and saves him. Later Oscar recalls a dream he had with the Mongoose. “Oscar remembers having a dream where a mongoose was chatting with him. Except the mongoose was the Mongoose. What will it be, muchacho? It demanded. More or less? And for a moment he almost said less…Less! Less! Less! But then in the back of his head he remembered his family. Lola and his mother and Nena Inca. Remembered how he used to be when he was younger and optimistic…More, he croaked. - - -, said the Mongoose…” (301). For the third time Yunior depicts the encounter with the Mongoose in another reality, this time in an actual dream. The Mongoose appears before Oscar in his moment of desperation and saves his life by asking the simplest question; more or less? By making Oscar question what he truly wanted in life, it revealed to him that he needed to live and that he couldn’t give up. Once again Yunior switched up his motives, and in turn the Mongoose’s motives. Yunior seemed to mix Beli’s encounter and Oscar’s first encounter together. Oscar and the Mongoose had an actual conversation while he was in the dream, just like Beli, but the dashes that Yunior adds to represent what the Mongoose said resembles the ambiguity of Oscar’s first encounter when the Mongoose said nothing. I think Yunior does this because he wanted to provide the reader with a solid foundation for interpretation of the conversation. The Mongoose talking at the beginning of the dream makes the reader curious as to what it would say at the end, and when Yunior leaves us with three blank spaces of the Mongoose’s final response we can do nothing but interpret and make up what we think the Mongoose said. After reading a passage in Bomb Magazine about Junot Diaz by Edwidge Danticat I started to connect what she said with the quote that I chose in the novel. “I think dictators want to silence writers because they want to be the only ones speaking” (Danticat). It made sense to me that Yunior wanted the voice of the Mongoose to be silenced. Yunior (who sometimes can be seen as a dictator-like figure) didn’t want the reader to know what the Mongoose had to say. Because if it was something that would make us react or think in a way that Yunior didn’t want us to feel or think about then he wouldn’t have control over what he wants us to think. By silencing the Mongoose and giving the reader blank lines, Yunior insures that in the end only his voice is being heard. The final encounter with the Mongoose may also have been the most magical encounter since the conversation actually happened in a dream whereas the other encounters were in dream-like phases magnifying Yunior’s love for the novels underlying genre of magical realism.

While writing this a question and idea came to my mind. What if the Mongoose isn’t actually the one saving Beli and Oscar? Maybe it’s actually just an object, or manifestation of Zafa that instills ideas and feelings of hope, strength, courage, and determination. The Mongoose was also accompanied by instances of magic such as the singing and gusts of wind further indicating that it had to have been more than just the Mongoose, but Zafa as well. Throughout the whole book Yunior weaves aspects of fantasy and magic in the form of Zafa while not allowing us to stray too far from what is real. It seems as if he’s writing this book to express himself the way Oscar always had throughout his brief and wondrous life. Oscar always wrote about what he liked, and that was something that always brought him joy in life. Yunior chased women around and was popular, but still he wasn’t always happy. Oscar may have taught Yunior his most valuable life lesson which is to do what you love. We know Yunior became a teacher in composition and creative writing and with his knowledge of sci-fi and real life history, this book was bound to be written. By writing this book Yunior makes his readers question what is real, what isn’t real, and everything in between.