76 pages • 2-hour read
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 3, Introduction-“The Final Letter”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Introduction Summary
Yunior says that by the following January, he and Lola live in separate apartments following another of his infidelities. One day, Oscar abruptly arrives at Yunior’s. His face is still a little disfigured from the beating, and he is slimmer than he’s ever been. Yunior thinks he looks like a man finally at peace.
Oscar says he wants to make a fresh start but needs to borrow a little money for a security deposit on a Brooklyn apartment. Against Yunior’s better judgment, he gives it to him.
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Final Voyage”
Oscar uses the money to fly to Santo Domingo one last time. Upon his arrival, he calls Clives, who drives him to Ybón’s house, where they wait for hours. Upon her return, Oscar calls out to her, and she insists that he leave immediately or else the capitán will kill them both. While Yunior believes she may have loved Oscar, she also “[k]new that in the DR they called a cop-divorce a bullet” (316).
For almost a month, Oscar researches, writes, and pursues Ybón relentlessly. Most days, she avoids him. Other times, she hisses at him that he must go home. Oscar puts love letters under her gate and receives phone calls by the capitán promising to murder him. Oscar reports these calls to the US embassy but to no avail. Belicia, Lola, and even Yunior all fly down to Santo Domingo to talk Oscar out of his pursuit. None of them manages to dissuade him.
On the 27th night of his trip, while Clives and Oscar are stopped at a red light, Grundy and Grod enter the taxi and force them both into the backseat. On the way, Oscar sees a vision of a bus driven by the Mongoose; the Man Without a Face is the ticket taker. When they reach the canefields, Grundy and Grod force Oscar out of the car and tie up Clives. In the fields, in perfect Spanish, Oscar explains his love for Ybón. He swears that if they kill him, he will be waiting for them on the other side when they die—not as a fat, unloved nerd but as an avenging hero.
When Oscar is finished, one of the officers says, “Listen, we’ll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English” (321). Oscar reflexively says, “Fire,” and in an instant he is dead.
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “The End of the Story”
Shortly after Oscar’s poorly attended funeral, Belicia’s cancer returns. On her deathbed 10 months later, Belicia says, “I did all I could and it still wasn’t enough” (323).
No charges are ever filed in Oscar’s murder. Swearing off the Dominican Republic for good, Lola says, “Ten million Trujillos is all we are” (323).
Yunior and Lola’s relationship doesn’t survive the trauma. Lola moves to Miami, becomes pregnant, and marries the father of her child, Ruben. Meanwhile, Yunior dreams often of Oscar. In some of the dreams, Oscar’s eyes are smiling, and Yunior thinks, “zafa.” In others, his face is missing, and Yunior wakes up screaming.
Today, Yunior lives with his wife in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he teaches creative writing at a community college. He writes all the time, a lesson he learned from Oscar. Yunior even sees Lola sometimes. She recently moved back to Paterson with Ruben and their daughter. Lola introduces Yunior to her daughter as “your tío’s best friend” (326).
Yunior dreads the day Lola’s daughter first encounters fukú. Some days, he is hopeful that she will learn to break the curse. On darker days, he is reminded of the last chapter of The Watchmen, one of Oscar’s favorite comic books, and the only piece of dialogue Oscar ever circled with a pen in any of his books: “Nothing ever ends” (331).
Part 3, “The Final Letter” Summary
Eight months after Oscar’s death, a much-delayed package arrives from the Dominican Republic. Inside, there are two manuscripts: a series of new chapters from Oscar’s unfinished space opera and a letter to Lola. The letter mentions a new book that will be shipped separately and that will explain everything. That book never arrives.
The letter also reveals that before his death, Oscar and Ybón spent a weekend away and had sex. To Oscar, the little intimacies before, after, and between sex are far more special than the sex itself. He writes, “So this is what everybody’s talking about! Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!” (334).
Part 3, Introduction-“The Final Letter” Analysis
The questions of why Oscar goes back to Santo Domingo, what he hopes to accomplish, and whether he achieves his goals are central to Part 3. His return could be viewed as an attempt to break the fukú cycle by standing up to it in an act of defiance. Fukú is clearly on Oscar’s mind as Grundy and Grod drive him to the canefields a second and final time; he hallucinates a vision of Abelard, Socorro, La Inca, Belicia, and Lola all getting on a bus driven by the Mongoose, no doubt transporting them to their doom via the fukú express. This vision darkly suggests that Oscar will only succeed in ending the fukú for himself and only through his own death, and that the rest of his family and their descendants will remain victims of the hex of the oppressor.
His aim may be more modest that bringing an end to the fukú. For Oscar, there may be value in the mere act of defiance itself. He is finally unafraid to speak the truth about his love for Ybón, even if it means his demise. This courageous act of filling the page, as it were, may not end the family fukú, but in Oscar’s mind, it might unleash a new fukú on the capitán, Grundy, Grod, and their families. Oscar suggests as much when he tells Grundy and Grod that “if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side” (321).
This may be a nice thought, but it is one Yunior rejects. To him, the legacy of oppression persists; what other explanation could there be for the fact that neither the US government nor the Dominican government pursues justice for Oscar’s death? This failure is what ultimately severs Lola from her homeland. Having vowed to never return to the Dominican Republic, she concludes, “Ten million Trujillos is all we are” (323).
For Yunior, the next great hope of breaking the curse of the Cabrals and de Leóns is Lola’s unnamed daughter. At his most optimistic, he expects the daughter to track down Yunior as soon as she learns about the family fukú—an inevitability, he suggests—and to read all of Oscar’s writings, which are still in Yunior’s possession. He writes, “And maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it” (330).
However, the tragedy of Oscar looms too heavily for him. He recalls the ending of Alan Moore’s 1986 graphic novel The Watchmen, which, along with The Lord of the Rings and the 1988 anime film Akira, is a key text that undergirds Oscar’s worldview. The line “Nothing ever ends” has enormous thematic impact. It is a grim acknowledgement that the cycle of fear, suffering, and trauma is, at best, temporarily slowed but never broken. What the line suggests is a far cry from the ending of The Lord of the Rings, in which evil is defeated with no lingering consequences. It is a reflection of Oscar’s maturity that, while, like Yunior, he continues to view the world through fantasy and science fiction, he increasingly relies on texts like The Watchmen that acknowledge harsh truths about oppression, as opposed to more fantastical allegories for evil like The Lord of the Rings.
Despite Yunior and Oscar’s embrace of The Watchmen and their rejections of happy endings, Yunior ends his book with exactly that: a happy ending. Although Oscar dies, he does not die a virgin, having shared a brief tryst in paradise with Ybón before his death. More importantly, he discovers that the true joy of sex involves the emotional intimacy rather than the act itself. Here, Oscar once again evinces an alternate, more evolved form of masculinity that is contrasted to Yunior’s “player”-type behavior with women. It might even be true that Oscar’s letter is partly the reason Yunior finally gives up his woman-chasing ways and settles down with a wife.
As for whether Oscar’s story about having sex with Ybón is “true” within the logic of the book, this may matter less than it seems on first glance. As when Yunior offers readers “the blue pill,” the narrator makes it clear that he is entitled to fill the blank pages of the Cabral and de León clan any way he sees fit. After over 300 pages, so many of which are filled with pain and suffering, Yunior sees no harm in giving Oscar the happy ending he deserves, even if it’s not the one he received.
Unlock all 76 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs