The End of Oscar Wao

In the final chapter of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior describes the final letter that he and Lola receive from Oscar. In this letter, Oscar writes about the final book he is writing and the investigations he has been performing in his return to the Dominican. He also describes the time he has spent with his love, Ybón. In the end, he not only kisses her, but has sex with her. Oscar writes that “what really got him…was the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated” (334). For me, despite Oscar’s death, there was something satisfying about the ending of the book. Oscar seems happier and full of the life that he is lacking throughout Yunior’s earlier descriptions of him. It seems as though he is now ready to die and full of joy at spending his final days with the love of his life. Though the end is tragic and it seems impossible to not feel bad for Oscar, perhaps he is content and believes he has led a “brief wondrous life.”   

Junot Diaz

In a 2009 National Book Conference, author Junot Diaz is asked various questions about his book. One woman states (12:38) that “when I came to the end of Brief Wondrous Life, I was surprised, considering how it ended, that I felt elevated. I felt a full sense of completion, a sense of full circle.” She thanks him for his ending and continues by asking Diaz to talk about “cycles in writing, or coming full circle in writing.” Her question resonated with me as I too felt a sense of completion with the final letters that Oscar sends. I was also intrigued by the response that Diaz gives. He states:

  

“You don’t want to be too deterministic because there are a like a billion Caribbeans, but the Caribbean that I came from… in central New Jersey that I grew up in, there was an emphasis on rhythm. Certainly when I was writing this novel the structure had a lot to do with rhythm or rhythm had a lot to do with the structure… If you let a book or a story steep in your head for longer than 6 or 7 years, you begin to see patterns that would otherwise elude you in just a fast writing. If there’s this kind of pleasing and felicitous rhythms I think part of it really comes from (a) coming from a culture that is obsessed with rhythm and (b) you sit with something long enough you can eventually hear the drums.”

I appreciated the two-part response that Diaz gives and it makes me wonder when he decided on the ending. During the duration of his writing, did he change the ending multiple times or was he always aware that Oscar’s death and love would come hand-in-hand in the finale? I think that these final letters are true because of the happiness Oscar exuberates in the final pages. He says “so this is what everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!” (335). These final exclamations describe the ease with which he lives his last days.  

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