Identity In JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings

Oscar, officially, is a Dominican-American male but is seen as neither a Dominican nor an American by his family and friends. He is not accepted by his Dominican community because he fails to pass the standard for a Dominican man – a hypersexual masculine being – as he is an overweight virgin boy who indulges in an abnormal interest. He is also not accepted by the white American community because of his features. As a result, Oscar is transformed into an “other” and persecuted by the society around him, resembling the characters of his fascination. His interest in the “Genres” (21) – comprised of superhero comics and fantasy works such as JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” – becomes both the cause and the remedy for his persecution.

In his youth, Oscar is described as “gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein, and even the Old Ones who were already beginning to fade — E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Stapledon, and the guy who wrote all the Doc Savage books… [he] could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Sian, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee,”

With his Dominican American peers, Oscar is a monster because of his “nerdiness” and his lack of the stereotypical Dominican masculinity. To his white American peers, Oscar is a monster because he is an immigrant, a person of color. His physical features, rather than his interests and personality, cause the whites to exclude him. They look at his “black skin and his afro” (49) and they immediately treat him as something to jeer at and subject him to “inhuman cheeriness” (49). The proximity of “inhuman” with the description of Oscar’s blackness conveys the concept of blackness as natural to monstrosity. To whites Oscar is not of their human world - Yunior asks “Antillean (who more sci-fi than us?)”