Character Analysis

Not-so-Great Guy Trying to Make Amends

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the narrator—whose name readers do not learn until late in the book is Yunior—tells the story of his college roommate, Oscar de León, who had been killed shortly after college.  Yunior narrates Oscar’s story, he says, as his “very own counterspell” (Diaz 7) for a curse, or fukú, he believes has influenced his life.  Yunior’s curse, he admits, “ain’t the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. . . .  It just happens to be the one that’s got its fingers around [his] throat” (Diaz 5).  Yunior wasn’t a very good friend to Oscar, and not a great person all around.  By the end of his account, however, Yunior has come to not only recognize that he needs to change; he has actually changed.

As Yunior narrates Oscar’s story, he also admits some hard truths about himself.  He comes to realize that he was not that great of a person, but he does not really try to change until years after Oscar’s death; before that, Yunior only gives lip-service to making an attempt.  For instance, every time Lola, Oscar’s sister, breaks up with Yunior over his infidelity, Yunior swears he will do better.  He tries for a little while to stay true to Lola, since even though “at college you’re not supposed to care about anything—you’re just supposed to [mess] around,” Yunior actually cares for Lola (Diaz 167).  However, after a small amount of time without sex, Yunior goes back to his philandering ways.  He is jealous of Lola’s boyfriends during the periods of time when she is not with him, but does not stop sleeping with other women, both between and during his relationships with Lola.  But even after Oscar’s death, when they find comfort in each other, Yunior and Lola are not happy together; the specter of Oscar’s death looms over their heads, and eventually they separate for the last time, Yunior alone once again.

Lola is the only reason that Yunior even agrees to become Oscar’s college roommate when they are younger.  Oscar is newly a freshman, and Lola thinks he needs someone to show him around campus, to get Oscar used to college life.  The attempt does not work very well.  However, when Oscar lapses into depression at the end of his sophomore year in college, Yunior continues as his roommate—but not for Oscar.  Yunior is too selfish for that; he really just wants Lola to admire him, so since “after the suicide drama nobody in Demarest wanted to room with homeboy, was going to have to spend junior year by himself” (Diaz 169), Yunior agrees to room with Oscar again.  Admitting to his own selfishness, Yunior says that he “liked to play it up as complete philanthropy,” but also has come to realize in the intervening years since Oscar’s murder that “that’s not exactly true” (Diaz 169).  After all, he does want to help Lola out, but he also wants to take care of himself.  His own college housing prospects had just become the worst he could possibly imagine, and Demarest—with the room he shared with only Oscar—was looking like the best option he was going to have, and that “Oscar, for all his unhappiness, didn’t seem like so bad an option” (Diaz 169).

Despite not having much interest in Oscar’s science-fiction and fantasy novels, Yunior’s vocabulary is changed by their influence.  Repeatedly, he makes references to El Jefe (Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina), comparing him to Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, and various places and people are also alluded to symbolically as places and people from that same series, which shows that Yunior at least read the books, whether he liked them or not.  He is also changed by Oscar’s death, but not enough to save his relationship with Lola, because he “was just too much the mess, and . . . one day she called, asked [him] where [he’d] been the night before, and when [he] didn’t have a good excuse, she said, Good-bye, Yunior, please take good care of yourself” (Diaz 324).  Yunior just cannot seem to keep himself from sleeping around, and does not even try, not even as a last-ditch attempt to get the woman he thinks is the love of his life back.  Finally, it is too late, and he hears from his mother that Lola is pregnant—and getting married (Diaz 324).

It takes Yunior at least ten years after Oscar’s death to even attempt change, and by the end of the novel, he has only just begun.  Throughout most of the novel, Yunior is a self-indulgent jerk, and it takes waking up “next to somebody [he] didn’t give two shits about, [his] upper lip covered in coke-snot and coke-blood” before he finally decides to clean up his life and tell Oscar’s story (Diaz 325).  Now, whenever Yunior bumps into Lola, they never mention their mutual past, and Oscar is the only subject they talk about (Diaz 327).  Yunior has finally accepted that he and Lola were not good for each other.  He falls in love with another woman, finally getting rid of his obsession for Lola, and knows that he does not deserve his wife.  He does not “run around after girls anymore. . . . Not much, anyway” (Diaz 326), and writes a lot, teaches creative writing in New Jersey, proclaiming himself “a new man” (Diaz 326).

Overall, Yunior was not a great person during the years of Oscar’s life, and especially not to Oscar.  However, through the hindsight of a narrator’s recollections, Junot Diaz shows that Yunior has truly begun to change, and that change is for the better.

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