Juno Diaz’s <i>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</i> and the Narration of Empathy

Abstract

Readers according to Virginia Woolf are co-creators of the text with writers. Reading requires letting imagination loose in order to become transported into a text, thus, eliciting cognitive empathy. Empathy has become recently a field of interest in several disciplines, among which is fiction. Empathic emotions can be elicited in readers, according to Keith Oatley, while reading fiction. This elicitation can be achieved through certain narrative techniques that mostly focus on identification with fictional characters. Using Suzanne Keen’s theory of narrative empathy and the theory of mind, adopted from Cognitive Psychology, this study will attempt to examine how Junot Diaz, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , utilizes narration of empathy that relies on alteration in narrative voice and authorial point of view, shifts in narrational focalization and other narrative and linguistic devices to immerse the reader in the story world of his novel. The study aspires to be an addition to the new branch of Cognitive Literary Studies that investigates literature through the focus of brain science and by extension the usefulness of Cognitive Studies to Literary Studies and vice versa.