Oscar Wao Timeline & Summary

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• We learn that our favorite Nerd King Oscar did have some slick Dominican-man charm once. When he was a little kid. He even courted two women at once, Olga and Marzita.
• What a player.
• But everything starts going wrong for our boy Oscar when puberty hits. He's overweight, has a 'fro, a bit of a mustache, sports Coke-bottle glasses—you get the picture.
• Rather than playing sports or going to parties like the average white kid, he totally nerds it up.
• He writes sci-fi and fantasy fiction, falls in love with girls from afar and has entire romances with them in his head, and hides out in his house playing Dungeons and Dragons.
• The other kids at Don Bosco High School are less than awesome to him. His mom, Beli, also hates his interests. His sister, Lola, wishes he'd get a life.
• Oscar hangs out with this girl from his SAT class, Ana, a lot. Of course, things don't work out between the two of them. Ana has a boyfriend—end of story.
• High school has been a total bust for our boy. Oscar hopes that college will be better.
• He goes off to Rutgers to live in Demarest Hall, which is supposed to be Nerd Heaven. He moves in with our narrator, Yunior.
• They get along pretty well for a while. Yunior encourages Oscar to take control of his life, and get his darn butt off the couch and outta the house; the two exchange their writing.
• But Yunior soon gets sick of Oscar's down-n'-out attitude, and general lack of coolness. And Oscar gets sick of Yunior trying to change him all the time.
• One night sophomore year, after Oscar gets dissed by yet another love interest, he attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge. He ends up landing on the grassy divider, though, and lives. He just breaks a bunch of his bones. Ouch.
• Don't we have any good news yet?
• No.
• Oscar does, eventually, graduate Rutgers. Then he goes back to Don Bosco to substitute teach, before teaching there full time.
• Who would have guessed that returning to the high school he hated would make him miserable?
• Um, we would have.
• Even though he's an adult now or whatever, all the kids still make fun of him.
• To break himself out of his slump, he decides to go back to visit the Dominican Republic with his family.
• While there, he meets a mysterious and charming (in Oscar's eyes, anyway) semi-retired prostitute named Ybón. Oscar falls hard for this woman.
• But there's a catch: she has a boyfriend. We are really starting to sound like a broken record here. And her boyfriend isn't just any old chap. He's the super scary captain (capitán) of the police force.
• The capitán's goons put a serious beat-down on Oscar.
• His family hustles him onto a plane back to the U.S. before he can get into any more trouble.
• Back in New Jersey, Oscar mopes around missing Ybón. Before long, he tricks Yunior into giving him money to buy a plane ticket back to the Dominican Republic.
• Dun dun dun.
• The capitán's men aren't messing around. This time, when they take Oscar out to the canefield, they kill him.
• But it's not all gloom and doom.
• We learn that, before he died, Oscar and Ybón got to spend one, amazing, romance-filled weekend together. They even had sex.
• Looks like a woman finally returned Oscar's affections.
• Reading Oscar's own words, post-mortem, we see that he felt his relationship with Ybón was the best thing that ever happened to him.
• He may have even beaten the family fukú. With love. Real, reciprocal, transcendent love.