“The trauma of Oscar's mother's illness and childhood, of the strained relationships--especially between his mother and sister...that of his extreme desire to fall in love (which I think was less about losing his virginity and more about finding a person who loved him the way he had always wanted to be loved. . .”
- From Erin Greene’s Discussion Board Post “Retro/Trauma and Oscar Wao"
What is love? What does it mean to be loved? How do you know when someone truly loves you? Although we (hopefully) all innately know the answers to these questions, it’s hard to put the answers into words.
When Oscar Wao was young, around the age of 7, people loved him because he was cute. He was “a ‘normal’ Dominican boy raised in a ‘typical’ Dominican family, [and] his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike” (11). Basically, Oscar learned at an early age that if you act how you are supposed to act and look how you are supposed to look, people will like you and show you love.
But, “our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about - he wasn’t no home-run hitter or fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock” (11). When he cries over a situation with his first girlfriends, his mother essentially tells him to be a man about it and slap the girl to earn her respect. (14). Obviously, this is not who Oscar is, and everything goes downhill from there.
Is it possible that all of Oscar’s problems stem back to this moment? This moment when he learned that girls love a certain type of man, and he could never be that man?
After all, it takes confidence to pursue relationships. Oscar didn’t think he was worth loving, so therefore, he didn’t pursue anyone that would actually love him. Sure he pursued lots of girls - but they were all either taken or so far out of his league that he never even stood a chance. Perhaps this was subconsciously done to protect himself. If you know that something’s never going to happen, it doesn’t hurt as much when it inevitably fails.
In this way, Oscar has a lot in common with many Millennials. It is popular today to craft the “perfect” presence. Social media is filled with the right pictures, seemingly casual shots that are the result of painstaking posing and editing. Every comment is framed to project the right image. Online dating is more popular than ever, yet everyone knows that what you see isn’t what you’re actually going to get. Is it possible that, like Oscar, the people with these carefully crafted personas feel deep down that they are not lovable for who they really are? Are they setting themselves up for failure because subconsciously they believe that it’s not going to work out for them anyway?
True love requires that you be your authentic self. You can only feel truly loved when someone knows the real you - good and bad - and they stick around anyway. Oscar’s problem wasn’t the fact that he liked “nerdy” things. Oscar’s problem was that he wasn’t confident enough to own the fact that he liked nerdy things, and believe that someone would love him because of it, not in spite of it.
In the end, Oscar finds his confidence. He is confident enough to stand up and tell Ybon how he feels. He is confident enough to keep going back, despite her refusals. In the end, his confidence wins. Ybon starts to fall for him. At the end, Oscar tells the men “about Ybon 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 it was only because of her love that he’d been able to do the thing that he had done, the thing that they could no longer stop” (321). In the end, Oscar knew that he could be loved exactly as he was, and it gave him the confidence to pursue that love.
And, in the end, isn’t that all that matters?
