Descriptions of Violence in Oscar Wao

“How she survived, I’ll never know. They beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog. Let me pass over the actual violence and report instead on the damage inflicted: her clavicle, chicken-boned; her right humerus, a triple fracture (she would never again have much strength in that arm); five ribs, broken; left kidney, bruised; liver, bruised; right lung, collapsed; front teeth, blown out. About 167 points of damage in total and it was only sheer accident that these mutherfuckers didn’t eggshell her cranium, though her head did swell to elephant-man proportions” (147).

Throughout the novel, the narrator consistently shirks on details of the violence occurring. Readers know vaguely that Beli’s traumatic past left her a physically and emotionally scarred orphan, but thus far in the novel, the only concrete details about Beli’s “Lost Years”  are given from La Inca. She “couldn’t explain what it had meant to find the burnt girl locked in a chicken coop” (128). When Beli is attacked by the Elvises, the narrator skips “over the actual violence” and chooses to “report instead on the damage inflicted” (147). Diaz’s stylistic choice to eliminate detailed descriptions of violence is interesting and different compared to the other novels we’ve read this semester like The Book of Night Women and The Surrendered where James and Lee were more direct about the violence inflicted on their characters.

An interesting reason for Diaz’s lack of violent description could be that the narrator is not a completely omniscient narrator; he only has the information (relayed years later) that others have told him about the characters’ lives and the struggles they face. The narrator doesn’t know the physical experience of what it was like for Beli to be so brutally attacked; he only knows the statistics about her injuries. Because he doesn’t know what the actual experience is like, he is unable to convey or communicate so violent an experience, and is therefore reduced to only video-game-like statistics “167 points of damage” (147) to illustrate the horror of Beli’s experience.