Theme

The Fantasy and Reality of Evil

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is primarily about a young man—Oscar de León—who is killed after falling in love with someone who could be considered as the “wrong sort” of woman.  That is just the plot of the novel, however.  The narrator, Oscar’s college roommate Yunior, tells the story many years after Oscar’s murder.  At the time, Yunior says, he does not believe in fukú, or evil curses.  Yunior’s use of fantasy references in the telling of Oscar’s, however, shows that although he did not believe in evil while he was experiencing the events he recounts, the evil existed anyway.  Good existed as well as evil, and Yunior recognizes that later in life as well.

La Inca and Beli, Oscar’s mother and grandmother, lived together in a respectable neighborhood for a time when Beli was younger.  The president of the Dominican Republic was an evil dictator, however, and a constant tension—or fear—of that dictator’s whims gave their home "a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it” (Diaz 78).  Minas Tirith, a large city from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels, is a nearly impregnable city with seven concentric stone walls, each built on a higher level than the one outside it.  When the city is attacked later in the trilogy, it takes a very large force with siege weapons and magically corrupted soldiers from Sauron’s kingdom of Mordor to even come close to defeating the people of Minas Tirith.  Diaz’s comparison of the atmosphere in la pequeña to the physical defenses of Minas Tirith illustrates the general feeling in Beli’s day that the regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina is evil.  In fact, even Beli’s father felt Trujillo’s evil, especially in “the portrait of Trujillo, which every good citizen had hanging in his house” (Diaz 230).  The portrait, Yunior says, “beamed down on [Abelard] with insipid, viperous benevolence” (Diaz 230).

Yunior likens Santo Domingo to Trujillo’s “own private Mordor” (Diaz 224).  Trujillo “acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons borhters, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before.  His Eye was everywhere; he had Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi” (Diaz 224-225).  Sauron’s Eye, which is all that was left of him after the ancient battle between the forces of Mordor and the other races of Middle Earth, sees anything that has to do with the ring which Frodo carries back to Mordor to be destroyed.

Unlike in The Lord of the Rings, however, the evil of Trujillo’s rule does not go away as easily as Sauron’s.  According to Yunior, “at the end of The Return of the King, Sauron’s evil was taken by “a great wind” and neatly “blown away,” with no lasting consequences to our heroes;* but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily.  Even after death his evil lingered" (Diaz 156).  Upon Trujillo’s assassination, Yunior says, “a great darkness descended on the Island [ . . . ] and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable [by Trujillo’s son Ramfis], the orgy of terror funeral goods for the father from the son” (Diaz 155-156).

Comparing Trujillo’s Secret Police to Sauron’s Eye and Santo Domingo to Mordor, thereby making Trujillo a modern-day Sauron, shows that Yunior has come to believe in true evil, and by extension, fukú in the years since Oscar’s murder.  After all, he says, “no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (Diaz 6).  Yunior is no longer naïve enough to believe that evil will just go away when its leader is destroyed, as in fantasy stories, however.  He has come to recognize that evil has always been—and will always be—a part of life.

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