of the other characters, important lessons about life and love. Yunior, especially, benefits from Oscar's example of demonstrating that real love exists beyond just sexual gratification and that being a real man is not dependent on a narrow Dominican definition of machismo.

Through his relationships with Jenni and then Ybon, Oscar provides for Yunior an example of intimacy and connection found through understanding and presence, as opposed to sex. In fact Yunior's experience with "love" is so the opposite of this, that when he first sees Oscar actually with Jenni, he is completely shocked:

They were just talking, about Alice Walker, but still. Oscar looking like he had just been asked to join the Jedi Order; Jenni smiling beautiful. And me? I was speechless.

By the end of the novel, when Yunior details the contents of Oscar's final letter, this human connection between man and woman has become, for Yunior and even more than it was before for Oscar, the true key to real intimacy. "The beauty!, The beauty!" (no doubt an understood antithesis to "The horror!, The horror!" at the end of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) of life can be found in the simple pleasures rather than the grandiose conquests:

...it was the little intimacies that he never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put his face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he's been a virgin all his life.

Similarly, Oscar, by example and not by intention, shows Yunior that Zafa, the only antidote to the virulent testosterone fueled Fuku, is aligning oneself with a destiny which dismantles the damaging and destructive cycle of that which came before. Ten years after Oscar's death, Yunior finally absorbs the most important lesson to be gleaned from Oscar Wao's brief and wondrous life:

—until finally I woke up next to somebody I didn't give two shits about, my upper lip covered in coke-snot and coke-blood and I said, OK, Wao, OK. You win.

Certainly for Yunior, as well as for the focused reader of Junot Diaz's wonderful novel, and for many characters throughout the book, including Lola, Ana, and Jenni, Oscar's sense of self and the way in which his "truth" provides for him a non-negotiable path offers a redemptive and affirming approach to the human challenges inherent in life and in love.

All the characters in the novel are like comic book characters: they have mental and physical powers that both make them great and curse them at the same time. This is also the recipe for a tragic hero, by the way. Both characters are on quests for a Holy Grail. Yunior's is sex; Oscar's is love. Each character's physical appearance hinders this quest. Oscar cannot find lasting love because of his weight, and Yunior cannot attract a wholesome girl because of his physique (and obsession with physicality).

Whose quest is nobler? Isn't it Oscar's?

Yunior and Oscar are foils. Both are larger than life characters in their passions. Yunior focuses his powers on the physical: weightlifting, physical love with the ladies, trying to get Oscar to lose weight. Oscar's powers are internal: he has huge heart and a wondrous imagination. Oscar wants love, but Yunior mistakenly equates this with sex. Oscar is trapped in what Yunior calls the "friend vortex," but what Yunior doesn't understand is that one must be friends first and lovers later if any relationship is to last. However, he will learn this lesson by the end of the novel.

Yunior is limited, especially in chapter 4, by his ability to know himself spiritually, his ability to love women emotionally, and his ability to sacrifice himself for others. Oscar, in his titanic inner passions, teaches Yunior how to move from a superhero to a tragic hero, from one who suffers from the fuku to one who overcomes it through sacrifice, thus ending it.