Love and Madness Anonymous College

Love is inherently linked with madness. All of history has proved love to be not only blind but deaf, and yet it stubbornly persists as one of the most defining characteristics of the human condition. It certainly perseveres throughout Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, defying reason, rhyme, and any and all pretenses at sanity. Love in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is akin to a disease, a disease that none of the characters fully recover from. In his role as narrator Yunior endeavours to firmly impress upon readers that the troubles that befall the characters, particularly Oscar, in the novel all relate back to the historical curse of fukú, the supernatural power believed to haunt the De Leòn family. However, the real curse of the De Leòn family is not the supernatural fukú, invoked by people when they cannot explain why really terrible, and really wonderful, things happen in the world; it is love, or the perversion of it that Oscar and the De Leòns understand it to be. Díaz refutes the notion of the supernatural by illustrating Oscar as a character consumed by love, he quite literally goes mad at the prospect of it, and in his repeated doing of so he perpetuates his family’s individualized fukú.

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