Oscar Wao questions

Here are a few questions we've been mulling over:

1) Why does it seem the general tone of the novel is heroic? (We've noticed that each time the narrator talks about Oscar (and Lola, and Beli), they are discussed as if they were heroes.) So, let's look for connections between the rest of the text and this.

2) Do you find that the book parodies people of Dominican descent? How? What are some ways we might defend this parody?

3) How does the narrator in Oscar Wao establish authority? In other words, how does he go about convincing us that we should believe him?

4) The book begins with a poem the last line of which is "either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." How is Oscar like a nation? How is Oscar representative of the Dominican diaspora?

5) If this book is "about Oscar", why have we seen so little of him so far into the book?

6) ...