Theme Framing in the Epigraphs

In the novels Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz follows the character Yunior in his struggles to reconcile his upbringing and concern for his reputation with his relationships with women and his awareness of morality.  Drown follows Yunior and his family through the lens of a struggling family unit and their hope to leave the Dominican Republic.  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao characterizes Yunior as one who observes a family's seemingly cursed lifestyle and tries to alleviate some of the grief it brings them, while struggling with the asceticism that necessitates.  In This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior wins and loses the trust of numerous women through his apparent self-awareness regarding stereotypical Dominican relationships and helplessness in resisting those stereotypes.  The epigraphs frame the themes in all three novels.

In Drown, the epigraph from Gustavo Pérez Firmat says:

"The fact that I

am writing to you

in English

already falsifies what I

wanted to tell you.

My subject:

how to explain to you that I

don't belong to English

though I belong nowhere else " (epigraph, Drown).

An epigraph should resonate with the characters in a novel; Yunior's subject should be similar to Firmat's--belonging nowhere.  Yunior seems to feel as though he belongs in between English and Spanish, as demonstrated by his switching back and forth fluidly between the two.  "I played Andrés Jiménez for her--you know, Yo quiero que mi Borinquén sea libre y soberana--and then we drank a pot of café" (115-116, Drown).  His mixed language also serves to make a reader without a background in both feel somewhat isolated; I do not "know" what he says "you know," and it makes me feel as though perhaps I "don't belong," as he and Firmat say that they do not.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz begins with two epigraphs, one of which comes from Fantastic Four, and the other of which ends:

"I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation" (epigraph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao).

Since Yunior devotes himself in the novel to exploring the life of Oscar Wao, née de León, one might read those epigraphs as applying to him.  His love of science fiction rendered Yunior conscious of his own affinity for it and self-conscious about how that interest might make him look to anyone else.  Furthermore, the notion of Oscar as "wondrous" comes with a degree of irony; he "...is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love" (back cover).  This disastrousness calls his wondrousness into question; ergo, "...either [he's] nobody, or [he's] a nation" (epigraph).

This Is How You Lose Her opens with a heart-cleaving epigraph by Sandra Cisneros:

"Okay, we didn't work, and all

memories to tell you the truth aren't good.

But sometimes there were good times.

Love was good.  I loved your crooked sleep

beside me and never dreamed afraid.

There should be stars for great wars

like ours" (epigraph, This Is How You Lose Her). 

The admission that not all memories are good implies that the speaker--with whom Yunior is naturally aligned in the epigraph--has experienced hardships in the recently-ended relationship.  Yunior fails to respect the women he seems to suspect he loves, but he never quite resolves to change until the end of the novel: "When you finish the Book a second time you say the truth: You did the right thing, negra.  You did the right thing" (212, This Is How You Lose Her).  The bad memories characteristic of his almost-love stemmed from an idea that he could cheat on women as long as they never caught him, and this idea permeated his love life until he abandoned it.  Consequently, his relationships failed slowly, painfully, and repeatedly until the struggle could be likened to a war.

In all three novels, Yunior worked to resolve the issues presented by the epigraphs, and by the end of This Is How You Lose Her, he keeps a prestigious job in America, makes friends with people like Elvis who do not judge him based on the kinds of books he reads, and learns to accept his failure to respect the women in his life.