Bradley Freeman

Embrace the Amnesia”: (Re)Writing Dominican History in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

In reading Junot Diaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, we are taken back to what Sigmund Freud in his essay, “The Uncanny,” calls “the old animistic conception of the universe” (Freud 944). Freud would suggest that the frame narrator, Yunior, takes on an archaic, and also narcissistic, frame of reference in his narrative because he gives credence to the supernatural and, subsequently, the uncanny. In my analysis of the novel, I want to explore Diaz’s use of the uncanny as a meditation on history itself—and Dominican history in particular—because Yunior is so obsessed with the redundant and fatalistic aspects of third-world history. Frederic Jameson argues in his book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place” (Jameson 1). I will engage Diaz’s postmodern novel as an attempt to “think the present historically;” indeed, this is a very complex narrative which examines the intricate relationship between the subject and history. Diaz threads elements of the postmodern and Freud’s interpretation of the uncanny together in an attempt to both fully comprehend and more accurately portray Dominican history. In seeming agreement with Jameson’s insistence that postmodernism itself poses many problems for historical narratives in general, Diaz implies that these problems are further reinforced and amplified when looking at third-world countries. I intend to analyze this uncanny narrative as an attempt to both understand and (re)write Dominican history in the wake of postmodernism, colonialism, and third-world oppression.

Brad Freeman is an Oregon native currently living in Columbus, Ohio. He studies Literature and Critical Theory at the Ohio State University.