Sometimes I really feel like a scholar and I write academic essays. This essay is about my favorite book in recent memory, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I talk about how to teach the text in the classroom. This essay was also to remind myself that it's OK to teach students with the materials I love. Pretty soon I'll be posting my unit ideas for teaching Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog in the classroom, as well as my unit on Alan Moore's Watchmen. I taught Diaz's work in excerpts this year. The kids really enjoyed the text, but I felt that I couldn't do the book complete justice. Next year I'm really going to go all out, but for now I'll have to be at peace with the thought that most of my kids thought the book was the best thing they ever read in a class. The essay is a doosey and I recommend reading it in pieces. Please comment and let me know what you think.
In Order to Dig One Must Know the Rules of Digging:
“Of what import are brief, nameless lives...to Galactus?”
Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Vol. 1, No. 49, April 1966)
Junot Diaz chooses to use the above quotation from Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four comic before he begins his novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Before interpreting the reason why Diaz might have chosen the quotation let us try to understand the quotation’s context. Galactus, the world devourer, sends his herald, the Silver Surfer, to scour the depths of the cosmos for planets on which Galactus might sate his mighty appetite. The Surfer arrives at a distant blue planet, Earth. Upon his arrival the Surfer informs the people of Earth that resistance is futile and that they should be honored to serve Galactus with their deaths. The Fantastic Four, the super family of the Marvel Universe, refuses to allow Surfer’s announcement to daunt them. For they know that their lives and the lives of all people on Earth matter enough to stand against the devourer of worlds, possibly the most powerful, amoral being in the entire universe. In much the same way, Oscar, the protagonist of Diaz’s novel, chooses to take a stand for his own little world against a force far greater than himself.
Diaz blends inner city slang Spanish, inner city slang English, Spanglish, formalized Dominican Spanish, comic book English, stylized informal literary English, and formalized literary English to tell Oscar’s story in a way that entices and opens the realm of his imagination to a very diverse readership. Due to the different language levels that Diaz uses to tell the story I am able to utilize the text, or at least excerpts from the text, with my English students. Since I teach in the Bronx, a borough that is generally known for low English test scores and unmotivated students, I need to reach out and find texts like Diaz’s, which manages to blend high ideas with dialectical forms of English and experiences to which my students can relate. I will utilize the discourse of stylistic analysis to dissect the various techniques, forms, and structures with which Diaz creates meaning and evokes an emotional response from his reader. The focus of this study is an excerpt from the final climactic moment in the novel; however, occasionally I will refer to other parts of the novel in order to establish a context for the reader. After an analysis of the linguistic features of Diaz’s text we can conduct a brief critical analysis and then speculate on how such a systematic close reading can be translated into a set of skill-based “lessons” for a high school English classroom.[1]
Teachable Moment 1: How to Analyze This Analysis
The framework for this critical reading comes from Chapter 9 of How English Works by Anne Curzan and Michael Adams. Curzan and Adams list the steps of a stylistic analysis to be as follows: “1. A systematic description of linguistic features in a specific text. 2. A critical analysis of the effects of these features, working together, in this specific text” (HEW 295). In other words, the “linguistic features” that are used to frame this study of Diaz’s text will give us the opportunity to critically analyze and relate these observations to the skill-sets and vocabulary students will need to perform this type of close reading. There are 8 “lessons” which are as follows: genre, perspective, type of speech, narrative structure, cohesion, verb processes, diction, and metaphor. Each lesson is framed with a set of “critical questions” that can be used simultaneously as classroom aims and guiding questions for teachers. In addition, each lesson contains at least one textual example and a brief summary of the skills acquired through the reading. We’ll begin our exploration by dissecting an excerpt from the novel in the style of a stylistic analysis.
Excerpt from The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
| Cohesion 1. Reference 2.Ellipsis/Substitution 3. Conjunction 4. Lexical Cohesion | Verbs Processes 1. Material 2. Mental Processes 3. Verbal Processes 4. Relational |
They walked him into the cane and then turned him around. He tried to stand bravely. (Clives they left tied up in the cab and while they had their backs turned he slipped into the cane, and he would be the one who would deliver Oscar to the family.) They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak. The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world.
Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody
knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybón and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they’d started to dream the same dreams and say the same words. He told them that it was only because of her love that he’d been
able to do the thing that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop, told them 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 on the other side and over there he wouldn’t be no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he’d be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.
They waited respectfully for him to finish and then they said, their faces slowly disappearing in the gloom, Listen, we’ll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English.
Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself.
Oscar –
Lesson 1: Redefine Genre
- How can we redefine our conceptions about genre?
- How can genre help us identify themes and author intention?
Genre is normally defined in the classroom as a category under which one can file a book. There is no question that, in the classical sense of the word, the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a coming-of-age novel (as dictated by both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble). However, another, more interesting, way to think about genres is “as types of texts that tend to occur in or are associated with specific contexts or social occasions and serve identifiable purposes within those contexts” (HEW 296). In other words, in a stylistic analysis, we as scholars and students need to approach genre more from the angles of theme and author intention. This approach to genre provides a bridge for students into how they may address these often large and unfamiliar notions of theme and author purpose. For example, in thinking about the story of Oscar Wao as a whole, we might determine that Diaz can fit into several genres. The novel might be seen as a social commentary on Dominican culture or even
a political satire of the Trujillo regime.
Solely examining the excerpt one might interpret the genre to be a narrative commentary on the battle between good and evil. Lines 10 through 14 reveal this notion when the speaker says, “[Oscar] told them 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 on the other side and over there…he’d be a hero, an
avenger.” The antagonists in the passage are portrayed through negative actions such as “they killed him” and “struck by a car,” and also by negative notions such as the idea that they and their children will “feel nothing.” Though the antagonists have the upper hand, due to their evil ways they and their children will be cursed. Meanwhile the protagonist, though about to be wiped out, is portrayed through positive images such as “waiting on the other side,” “hero,”
and “avenger.” The protagonist, though physically helpless at the moment, has a brighter future awaiting him in his next life. Good, ultimately, triumphs over evil though evil may seem to be the more powerful of the two.
Potentially, redefining genre will give teachers an opportunity to model in-depth analytical skills and it will give students an opportunity to focus their views on theme and author intent through critical questions such as, “Why did the author write this piece?” and “What are the main ideas of the piece?” In addition to critical questioning skills, this particular example of this type of analysis would also provide a student with the opportunity to learn how to determine important ideas and discern the difference between positive and negative imagery.
Lesson 2: Question Perspective
Critical Questions:
- How can we identify the type of narrator in a text?
- How is the way a narrator presents important information essential to the reader’s understanding of a text?
Once a reader has established the purpose of a piece in their mind, they must examine the voice that is used to present the piece. English teachers typically teach the 1st and 3rd person points of view, but the question is how many of them are explaining to their students how to examine the implications of the narrator’s perspective? Junot’s choice for narrator is Yunior, one of the characters in the novel, which seamlessly moves between a 1st person point of view and the 3rd person limited point of view. This is not immediately discernible in the passage because it lacks any 1st person references to Yunior. However, the passage does provide an opportunity to explore how the third person limited point of view allows the reader to make a deeper connection to the passage through the plight of the main character. This type of connection can be extracted from the text at the very beginning of the passage when the narrator says, “They walked him into the cane and then turned him around. He tried to stand bravely.” Oscar’s plight is immediate. “They” have control of his actions because they “walked” him and “turned him around.” Oscar is powerless and this powerlessness is portrayed to the reader in a straightforward fashion in that Oscar “tried to stand bravely.” The narrator’s use of the verb “tried” takes away both Oscar’s physical ability to stand and any sense of bravery that might have accompanied his action. There are no thoughts, only actions, and the 3rd person limited narration gives an unblinking, straightforward quality to the narrative. The fact that these actions are removed from the 1st person allows the reader to attain a broader awareness of the implications of the cane field as killing field and Oscar’s powerlessness in his inability to act.
In addition to knowledge about the different points of view, teachers must also model critical questioning skills that allow students to make connections to the text. These connections translate to a deeper awareness of the importance and immediacy of the literature.
Lesson 3: Interpreting Types of Speech
Critical Questions:
- How can we identify the difference between direct and indirect speech?
- How do the ways that a text presents speech and thought influence how a reader might interpret the deeper ideas of a text?
There are two types of speech in a piece of writing, direct and indirect. Direct speech is “quoted verbatim, with quotation marks” and indirect speech is “reported secondhand, with no quotation marks” (HEW 309). Writers often use direct speech as a way of depicting conversations as they occur in real-time and also as a means to characterization through giving characters unique speech patterns. Indirect speech is often used as a way to get across the gist of a conversation without displaying the actual conversation. Indirect speech can also be used to convey an experience from a broader perspective. Both forms of speech can be used to convey the stylistic effects of speech and control the tempo of a piece. The passage clearly demonstrates that Diaz blurs the line between the two in that he uses indirect speech that sounds like direct speech and direct speech without quotation marks. In fact, when it comes to direct speech Diaz kicks quotation marks to the curb for the entire novel, thus the reader is able to determine that Diaz’s lack of quotations is definitely a stylistic choice. Another observation is that the narrator prefers indirect speech, as evidenced by the lack of direct speech in the passage, which broadens the scope of the narrative and speeds the pace of the story to be more in line with an oral story, rather than a written text.
Lines 7 – 9 effectively demonstrate this oral mode of indirect speech: “He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world.” For the most part, the speech in the narrative is demonstrated through third person pronouns coupled with the past tense verb “told.” The indirect speech patterns of the narrator create a narrative that is heard, rather than seen on the page. This style of speech combines with the effect of the 3rd person limited narrator to provide an experience that is like an oral retelling of an important event. The rarity with which Diaz uses direct speech in the passage demonstrates how the narrator stylistically slows down his narrative for particularly jarring moments. An example of Diaz’s stylistic form of direct speech is demonstrated in line 18 when Oscar blurts out, “Fire.” The lack of quotations allows the narrative to flow more naturally and thus continue the effect of the indirect oral narrative. The result, however, slows down the narrative just enough to build suspense and make the reader ruminate on Oscar’s pathetic existence for a little bit longer. As modeled in this analysis we can see that through an exploration of direct and indirect speech students can acquire the skills necessary to pick up hints of stylistic effects and also how the tempo of a narrative can be established and changed based on the author’s style.
Lesson 4: Dissecting Narrative Structure
Critical Questions:
- How can we identify the components of a narrative?
- How do different methods of textual cohesion represent various meanings in a text?
Typically narrative is taught as a sequential bell curve that begins with an exposition, maxes out with a climax, and ends with a resolution. Simply put, there is beginning, middle, and end. While this method is great for teaching sequence and summary, it leaves something to be desired in terms of academic rigor. I believe that the six-step narrative outlined by Curzan and Adams on page 305 of How English Works is a more effective model to teach higher-level thinking about narrative structure in addition to sequence and summary (See Appendix B). The “Components of a Narrative” section of the book can be photocopied and distributed to students, or the sections can be broken into bulleted notes for students to jot down. In this way students can acquire the necessary vocabulary to name the components. Let us examine the narrative structure of the passage.
Both the abstract and the orientation of the passage occur in line one when the text says, “They walked him into the cane and then turned him around.” Line one gives an overview of the situation and orients the reader with who and where the players are. The complicating action of the piece occurs in lines five and six when the text says, “They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak.” Oscar is too weak to perform any action other than speaking in the passage. He cannot walk, turn, or stand by himself, but he can speak. By performing an action of his own accord Oscar takes control of his destiny and the situation changes. An example of evaluation in the passage occurs in lines 13-14 when the text says, “Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.” The lines end Oscar’s indirect monologue and give his speaking a moral. It seems at this point that the narrator is using Oscar’s final moment to reveal an important truth to the reader. The fact that (he put his hand up) in the only parenthetical in the passage can lead the reader to make an inference that this particular sentence can be taken in its own special context. The resolution of the story occurs in lines 15-18. The men promise to let Oscar “go,” but instead trick him into telling them to “fire.” The fatal trick ends Oscar’s life and the events of the passage swiftly. What’s interesting is that the coda of the passage can be interpreted as either lines 13-14, due to the lesson it seeks to teach, or line 19, which simply reads “Oscar –.” The em dash is traditionally used to indicate the presence of a parenthetical thought, however there is no final thought on Oscar because he has died. Perhaps the em dash indicates that Oscar exists even after he leaves the world of the written page. Though his story falls into the void of the blank page, it has been engrained on the reader’s mind and thus serves as a lesson in bravery. Reexamining the components of a narrative through the lens of stylistic discourse can lead students to more complex interpretations through a close examination of how the author utilizes different sections of a narrative.
Lesson 5: Thinking About Grammar Through Cohesion
Critical Questions:
- How can we define and identify the different types of cohesion in a text?
- How does knowing the different methods of textual cohesion lead to a better reading of a text?
Curzan and Adams identify the four elements of textual cohesion as “reference,” “ellipsis” and “substitution,” “conjunction,” and “lexical cohesion” (HEW 300). For the purpose of this analysis let’s simply concentrate on an example of reference and conjunction.[2] Reference can be defined in the classroom as a way to connect sentences through the use of both pronouns and the antecedents to which they refer. An example of how this may work in the passage comes from the usage of the pronouns “them” and “they” to refer to the two thugs. Without a proper context, the pronouns leave the reader asking the obvious question of “who are they?” The “they” in the novel refers to two evil men that the narrator simply refers to as Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy[3]. However, the reader wouldn’t have known this from the passage. This little example demonstrates how important it is for a good reader to determine antecedents. Teaching students explicitly about reference and the different types of references can build important tracking skills for comprehension of a complex text. In addition, seeing how references work will make students more aware of references in their own writing.
Conjunction in the classroom is normally limited to a discussion of actual conjunctions and their functions, but the stylistic definition allows conjunction to be expanded to connect both ideas within a single sentence and within several sentences. An example of conjunction in the passage is the sentence that starts in line 9 and ends in line 15. The sentence is connected with four ands and three ors. The sentence demonstrates two aspects of the conjunction: one its ability to further a thought by providing greater details and two its ability to create complex run-on sentences. Fortunately Diaz is a skilled writer who uses the conjunction to expand his idea and simultaneously give the narrative the feeling of an oral story. Students can use the idea of conjunction to build their skills for tracking ideas across sentences as well as within individual sentences.
Lesson 6: Identifying Verb Processes
Critical Questions:
- How can we identify and classify different types of actions?
- How can we frame critical questions based on the types of actions in a text?
Grammatically, a verb is defined by its relationship with the word that follows it. Verbs can be transitive, intransitive, two-place transitive, and to be. In addition, a verb can also be viewed through process, or an “action that involves specific participant roles” (HEW 310). In other words, we can also view a verb by what it does, who does it, and whom they do it to. Curzan and Adams divide verbs into four categories of processes, which are “material processes,” “mental processes,” “verbal processes,” and “relational processes” (HEW 310). A close reading with these different verb processes in mind can lead to exciting discoveries in how the author uses verbs to express meaning (See Appendix C for a more detailed explanation of each type of action).
For example, in the passage there are roughly eighteen material processes, ten mental processes, and nine verbal processes. The material processes, such as “walked,” “turned,” “killed,” “disappearing,” and “fire,” are mostly actions that Grod and Grundy act on Oscar. They are strong and he is helpless, therefore the physicality of the passage belongs to the evil duo. However, the mental and verbal processes in the passage, such as “love,” “dream,” and “told,” belong to Oscar. Oscar’s mental and verbal processes act upon the men as well as the world. His story and mental capacities are greater than the physical strength of the men. Though they may kill him, he will continue to exist in a greater capacity. Much like Obi Wan in Star Wars once Oscar is struck down he will become more powerful than any of them can possibly imagine. His love, his words, and his dreams will live on, while Grod and Grundy disappear “in the gloom.” In light of this example we can conclude that the critical questions to arm students with for this type of analysis are, “Who are the actors or agents, and who is acted upon?” and “What kinds of verbs occur in the text?” (HEW 310). These questions can allow students to begin asking their own questions about how verb processes function to convey meaning in a text.
Lesson 7: Diction is Everything
Critical Questions:
- How can word choice influence a reader’s experience with a text?
- How can analyses of word choice lead to critical inquiry?
In a phrase, word choice, or diction, is everything. Words, words, words fill the reader with imagination, emotions, notions, and just about any other –ion we can think of. Without words there is no text to read and without the diverse lexicon of the English language there can be no style. Without word choice, how would one writer be able to differentiate him or herself from another writer? How would an author convey meaning? Because diction is such a large category I’ve chosen to narrow the scope of diction to the realm of lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion ties the parts of a text together, both in the realm of ideas and style. Lexical cohesion includes the “Repetition of words across sentences” and the “Use of synonyms to create semantic connections” (HEW 302). The use of repetition and synonyms can both help a reader determine important ideas in a passage and make interpretations as to why an author chose to repeat certain words while changing others.
For example the passage repeats variations of the word “love” seven times. Oscar talks about his love of Ybón and her love of him. The repetition of the word asserts that love is an important idea in the passage and helps the reader draw an inference that love is the thing that Oscar is willing to die for. This observation allows the reader to understand how important and powerful love is in the realm of the text, which in turn adds significance to Oscar’s death. A connection can also be made to the Bible. Much like Jesus, Oscar is willing to die for love, which gives Oscar the status of martyr. Oscar’s death is not in vain. The sample connection here demonstrates that a student could learn about asking questions, determining important information, making inferences, and making connections all within the diction lesson.
Lesson 8: Metaphor in the Familiar
Critical Questions:
- How can we identify complex metaphors?
- How can we break down complex metaphors for simpler understanding of higher-level ideas?
Metaphor is usually defined in the classroom as a comparison that “likens two things by identifying one as the other” (Drury 168). The obvious shortcoming of this definition is that it limits metaphor to the realm of “things” and usually leaves students scratching their heads when the teacher asserts that everyday language use can attain a status in the figurative realm of the metaphor. Good writers aspire to employ “novel, more dramatic metaphors” to “draw our attention and make new; unfamiliar connections among things and notice new aspects of familiar things” (HEW 314). It is within the vein of the “familiar” that readers must connect to complex metaphors. Familiar “things” must be expanded into specific thought boxes and include objects, ideas, as well as every day language. In this sense metaphors are “‘carriers’ which help readers make ‘imaginative leaps’” (Drury 169). The writer provides the height, but the reader must provide the Air Jordans to make the leap. These figurative Jordans are laced and strapped tight with the prior knowledge that a student brings to the text such as text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections.
An example of how every-day language use can be linked to metaphor comes from the saddest metaphor in the passage, which has to do with the slight play on the word “fire” in lines 17 and 18 of the passage. Grod and Grundy tell Oscar, “Listen, we’ll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English.” Oscar blurts out “Fire” “unable to help himself.” Fuego literally means fire in English, however, the Spanish word strictly adheres to the meaning of fire as a noun. In English the word is clearly acceptable as a noun, as in a forest fire, or a verb, as in to discharge a firearm. The Spanish equivalent for the verb fire is actually disparar. Grod and Grundy blatantly misinterpret Oscar’s utterance of the noun “fire” and equate it with the English verb. This mistranslation amounts to little more than a mean-spirited pun for the men. The metaphor at work in the exchange is one that allows the reader to think of metaphor in terms of comparing languages and not just ideas. The higher-level understanding that a reader takes away from the passage is the implication in the passage that the men discharge their guns when Oscar says, “Fire,” killing Oscar in the process. Oscar’s untimely demise requires the reader to make an inference regarding the every day use of English and Spanish. An even higher imaginative leap can be made with the use of “fire” as a bilingual pun. Since the word infers Oscar’s death and is used as a pun simultaneously, the critical student might be able to make the jump that Oscar’s death is little more than a cruel joke. This imaginative bound heightens the feeling of contempt the reader has towards the evil men and deepens the emotional tie the reader has with the suffering protagonist. The metaphor, broken down with an affinity for every day connections, is perhaps the most potent tool in a student’s analytical toolbox.
Teachable Moment 2: Bringing it all Together & Teaching the Tex
years now and I still think about him” (Diaz 324). This is the essence of a good story. Years and years pass, yet we as readers still ruminate on new observations and feelings that may come about through a random, thoughtlessly worded allusion or arise upon a memory in the middle of a quiet, but sleepless night. In the end English teachers need to help students reach the level where books actually carry this kind of meaning. Readings and lessons conducted in the discourse of stylistics can help English teachers reach this goal a little easier. We must simply remember that the lessons of genre, perspective, speech types, narrative structure, cohesion, verb processes, diction, and metaphor can help develop the analytic skills that lead to deeper levels of understanding.
Why make our students skate upon the cold surface of literature when we can defrost the ocean and swim?
Works Cited
Diaz, Juniot. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books. New York. 2007
Drury, John. The Poetry Dictionary. Writer’s Digest Books. 2006.
[1] A lesson is normally just one day. I use the term “lessons” loosely to refer more to a set
of skills learned over the course of however many lessons a teacher needs to
teach a skill-set.
[2] Due to the close relationship between diction and lexical cohesion, the diction lesson is reserved for a discussion of lexical cohesion.
[3] Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy are semi-obscure DC comics villains known for their size and strength.
