Time, Plot, and Oscar Wao

Narrative/Plot Map of Oscar Wao

Current Time (?)

1974-1987

1955-1962

1982-1985

Epigraphs (Watcher and Walcott), Prologue

1974 – 1987 in Paterson, New Jersey

1955-1962, Santo Domingo

1982-1985 (Paterson and DR)

• Unnamed Narrator who we will learn is Yunior
• fuku
• zafa
• a little bit of the history of Carribean and DR
• Trujillo
• Oscar's love of Sci-fi and role as writer

• Yunior is narrating again
• Starts with Beli right after she moves in with La Inca--told we know little about years before, though La Inca tells her how her family was high class
• Beli gets a scholarship to El Redentor, does not fit in
• Beli gets breats, realizes she can attract male attention, seduces school dreamboat Jackk Pujols
• Jack tells her they will marry, she has sex with him, they get caught, he throw her over, gets sent to military school, she gets expelled
• Beli refuses to go to any school, starts working as waitress at Chinese restaurant
• Meets "the Gangster" one night, he chases her, she falls hard
• Believes the gangster will marry her and take her to Miami
• Gets pregnant, finds out the Gangster is married to Trujillo's sister
• Trujillo's sister has her taken to a cane field and violently beaten, she loses baby
• Magical mongoose leads herout telling her she will still have 2 children
• La Inca decides to send her to NY
• On plane, Beli sits next to guy who will end up being Lola and Oscar's father and her last love

• Still Yunior narrating
• young Oscar is a player--even has 2 girlfriends
• First rejection
• Becomes role playing nerd whose friends, Al and Miggs hook each other up bit not him
• Meets a girl, Ana, ends up in friend zone
• Starts college, realizes nothing has changed

• narrator is Lola in 2nd person
• starts with mother having her feel tumor that turns out to be breast cancer
• Lola starts to rebel from being good dominaca daughter as Beli sickens
• Lola goes goth, runs away with boy
• calls Oscar, he brings family
• Lola starts to run, Beli fakes a fall, Lola goes back
• Lola gets sent to DR lives with La Inca
• Goes to school, gets makeover, starts to run track, gets a nice boyfriend, Max
• Begins to get "bruja" feeling, sleeps with Max, starts to run terribly
• sees pics of mother in photo album, says she was pretty, La Inca says she was a goddess

1985

1992-1995

1944-1946

1988-1992

Section II Introduction: Santa Domingo, 1985

Dominican Republic, 1944-1946

Paterson, NJ, 1992 – 1995

1988-1992, Rutgers University

• Lola narrates again
• She gets really angry and rebellious because Beli has decided she has t go back to NJ
• Seduces a friend's father, makes him give her $2000, plans to run away
• But she finds out her boyfriend Max has been killed in an accident, gives money to family for funeral

• Yunior finally tells us who he is and how he knows De Leons (big crush on Lola)
• Yunior agrees to room with Oscar because he tried to commit suicide
• He tries to get Oscar to exercise and be less pathetic, with little success
• Oscar has another friend zone relationship with Jenni, a cool goth girl Yunior tried to get with
• Jenni dumps Oscar, he's super depressed
• Oscar drinks 3 bottles of liquor Yunior bought him, tries to commit suicide, but falls into a planter instead
• Right before he jumps, he thinks he sees a Mongoose
• The next year, Yunior rooms with him again after he and Lola break up

• Yunior Narrates
• Oscar moves back in with Mom after college, subs at his old school
• Students don't respect him and even when he tries to reach out to outcast kids, they avoid him
• He has another friend zone relationship with, Nataly, a girl who enjoys dead bodies
• We find out Yunior and Lola are living together, but he keeps cheating on her
• Oscar decides to go back to DR for summer with Beli and his Uncle, figuring things can't be worse
• Turns out he loves DR: he forgot how fun it could be, hangs out with cousins, decides to stay there all summer (Beli is a little worried)
• Oscar meets a woman, Ybon, who is a current/former prostitute.
• It's friend zone time again, but Ybon does seem to genuinely like Oscar and he enjoys his time with her
• Turns out Ybon's boyfriend is a police captain and super-possesive, he pushes Oscar around and shoots up his door
• Then he sends out his goons who take Oscar to a sugar field and beat him viciously
• La Inca manages to find him, in part because of some magical (Mongoosian?) singing
• Oscar dreams of Mongoose
• He recovers slowly but refuses to leave the DR, because he loves Ybon.
• Ybon begs him to leave and tells him she is marrying the Captain
• Oscar returns home, is depressed, has dreams about canefield

• Yunior Narrates
• Back story of Beli's Family
• Abelard, her father, is a Doctor who lives well, mostly interested in intellectual ideas, but keeps head down and appears to support Trujillo
• But his oldest daughter (Jacqueline) is getting beautiful (Beli not born yet) and Trujillo is known for raping young girls he finds desirable
• Spends several years trying to hide daughters, Trujillo finally demands they come to a party, he does not bring them, a few weeks later he is arrested
• A long footnote points out that this happens over and over not just in Trujillo's reign, but in DR history--tells story of Anacaona, a Taino woman who dies rather than agree to marry a Spainard
• The story is that he made a joke about Trujillo taking the bodies out of his car trunk--Yunior discusses how no-one really knows. Says it may also be that Abelard wrote a book that claimed Trujillo had supernatural powers
• Beli concieved when, Socorro, Abelard's wife, visits him in prison first time
• We get Socorro's back story, which is pretty grim
• Socorro dies when she is hit by a truck
• Her family takes Beli hoping to get money from the Abelard side of family. Since they don't, they sell her as a slave, or criada. She is treated awfully and burned with a vat of hot oil when she tries to sneak away and go to school
• Other 2 daughters get killed in random accidents
• Abelard dies right before Trujillo is shot (which is just about when Beli gets pregnant)
• La Inca hunts down Beli, hears a bit about her experiences
• After that Beli refuses to speak or remember of this time
• La Inca cares for Beli and she learns to read and write. She is really proud of being in school and being able to answer things.

• Track the order in which events are related, noting coincidence, parallel and contrasting structures, and repeated challenges, crises, conciliations, episodes, symbols, motifs.
• Why is the text structured in this way: to create significance, raise the level of generality, extend or complicate the meaning?

1995

1995-2005+

Paterson, NJ, 1995

Santa Domingo, 1995

U.S., Various Times

• Yunior narrates
• He and Lola are together, but fighting. He keeps cheating on her.
• Oscar comes and visits him, tells him he shouldn't cheat on Lola, asks to borrow some money.
• Oscar heads back to DR

• Oscar comes back to DR, starts chasing Ybon
• She begs him to go, though she is miserable without him, he writes and chases for 27 days
• Goons come back to get him, he knows it is the end, sends telepathic messages of love out
• Goons take him back to sugarcane field, ask him what "fuego" is in English, he says fire, they do

• Yunior narrates
• Immediately after last chapter, Oscar's funeral is poorly attended
• A year later, Beli's cancer returns, she dies 10 months later
• Yunior tells us he cheats on Lola some more, she dumps him and moves away, he calls her when she finds out she is pregnant a few years later, she hangs up on him
• Years later, Yunior is still dreaming about Oscar, Zafa, and faceless men
• After 10 years, Yunior is still having dreams: he wakes up from a crazy one night stand and dream, says "Ok, Wao, you win"
• He becomes a writer, gets a job teaching writing, has a wife he loves (we're not sure how long this takes, but we're at least in the now of when this book was published, 2007)
• Yunior thinks about a Watcher quote
• He and Lola run into each other
• She tells him that 8 months after Oscar died, she got a package with some stuff Oscar was writing, and a long letter
• The letter promised a second manuscript, that "contains everything I've written on this journey. Everything I think you will need. You'll understand when you read my conclusions. (It's the cure to what ails us, he scribbled in the margins. The Cosmo DNA)"
• It also tells Beli he and Ybon snuck away to the beach for a weekend and he finally had sex and it was amazing

Plot

Resolutions may be:

Closed: readers feel that they know what will happen. The various parts of the plot are tied together satisfactorily, and the reader feels a sense of completion.

Open: readers must draw their own conclusions; they do not know what will happen.

Cliffhangers: an abrupt ending at an exciting and often dangerous time in the plot. Its purpose is to keep the reader reading. It is usually found at the end of a chapter, but occasionally a book will end this way.

Narrative/ Plot: all the events of text in order they are related. Authors may choose not to use chronological order to build interest or make connections: instead, they employ flashbacks, time lapses, or flash forwards.

Story/ Narratology: sequence of events we reconstruct, ordering and dropping unimportant stuff

Exposition: an explanation of the situation and the condition of the characters

Rising Action: tension is built through a series of complications, incidents which either help or hinder the protagonist in finding a solution

Climax: the peak or turning point of the action

Denouement: the part after the climax. It gives any necessary explanation and ends with resolution, the sense of at the end of the story that it is complete

Some Plot Questions to Consider

• Track the order in which events are related, noting coincidence, parallel and contrasting structures, and repeated challenges, crises, conciliations, episodes, symbols, motifs.
• Why is the text structured in this way: to create significance, raise the level of generality, extend or complicate the meaning?
• If events don’t seem to happen with any particular relation, is this a sign of bad writing, or a thematic choice, meant to represent the chaotic nature of human experience, a failure in a character's experience or personality, or the lack of meaningful order in the universe?

(Kirszner and Mandell and http://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/criticalreading.html#pcharacterization)

Our Friends, Analytical Questions

Data Collation: Yes BUT outcomes

Fabula (story) refers to the chronological sequence of events in a narrative; sjuzhet (plot) is the re-presentation of those events (through narration, metaphor, camera angles, the re-ordering of the temporal sequence, and so on)

Writing:

leaves blank spots/hides past

can cause great disaster

seen as motivator for long future actions

Time Shifts:

Reveal Connections

Often connect to a written text

Often relate a presently narrated event to a long historical past

Plot vs Narratology

• What is the significance of the Mongoose?

• How does the setting of the sugar cane field work in the text? Does it convey meanings other than its literal definition? Does it mean different things to different audiences? How would the text change if “the sugar cane field” were replaced by a different setting?

• What is the effect of the blabnk pages? How does it achieve that effect? What details contribute to the overall effect?

What is the significance of the tension between writing as a means of propelling future events and creating gaps and time shifts as a means of revealing past connections and filling in information?

Time, Plot, and Oscar Wao

Yunior Narrates

Back story of Beli's Family

Abelard, her father, is a Doctor who lives well, mostly interested in intellectual ideas, but keeps head down and appears to support Trujillo

But his oldest daughter (Jacqueline) is getting beautiful (Beli not born yet) and Trujillo is known for raping young girls he finds desirable

Spends several years trying to hide daughters, Trujillo finally demands they come to a party, he does not bring them, a few weeks later he is arrested

A long footnote points out that this happens over and over not just in Trujillo's reign, but in DR history--tells story of Anacaona, a Taino woman who dies rather than agree to marry a Spainard

The story is that he made a joke about Trujillo taking the bodies out of his car trunk--Yunior discusses how no-one really knows. Says it may also be that Abelard wrote a book that claimed Trujillo had supernatural powers

Beli concieved when, Socorro, Abelard's wife, visits him in prison first time

We get Socorro's back story, which is pretty grim

Socorro dies when she is hit by a truck

Her family takes Beli hoping to get money from the Abelard side of family. Since they don't, they sell her as a slave, or criada. She is treated awfully and burned with a vat of hot oil when she tries to sneak away and go to school

Other 2 daughters get killed in random accidents

Abelard dies right before Trujillo is shot (which is just about when Beli gets pregnant)

La Inca hunts down Beli, hears a bit about her experiences

After that Beli refuses to speak or remember of this time

La Inca cares for Beli and she learns to read and write. She is really proud of being in school and being able to answer things.