“Tú No Eres Nada De Dominicano”: Unnatural Narration and De-Naturalizing Gender Constructs in Junot Díaz's the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Abstract

This article offers a reading of Dominican American novelist Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). A recent development in narrative theory, unnatural narration, illuminates the narrative perspective used in Díaz's novel, which violates traditional narrative conventions for distinctions between first-and thirdperson narrators. The novel also participates in the unnatural in its use of science fiction and fantasy literature, and in its representation of logically impossible scenarios. Ultimately this process is linked to European colonization and nationalist dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. However, the unnatural narration lays bare and in effect denaturalizes gender constructs, which, like all ideologies, frequently masquerade as "natural." The novel's unusual, unnatural narrative stance critiques the definition of masculinity to which the narrator on the surface seems to subscribe, and thus Díaz's novel provides a space for more democratic definitions of masculinity to emerge.

Immersion and Defamiliarization

“…Given the often experimental nature of texts deemed unnatural, it is no surprise that the term "defamiliarization" appears quite often among practitioners of unnatural narratology. Among other places it is referenced in Alber et al 2010, in Richardson 2011, in Weese 2014, and discussed in Richardson 2015 (24-25). Only in one case has the concept been used to distinguish the unnatural (Iversen 2016).…”