How are the tone/theme of the novel filtered througthout The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot
Diaz filters his themes of family, love, alienation, and violence through multiple
narrators (mainly Yunior).  In an interview, Diaz
said:

I felt like one of the biggest absences was
hiding in plain sight, which is that we actually never meet directly the protagonist.
The protagonist, Oscar, is always filtered through this other narrator, Yunior. Part of
it was this desire to make Oscar simultaneously present but also entirely invisible. It
was a strategy to talk a lot about how do you put a story together from fragments and
how you put a story together from
absences.

Because of the fuku (the
curse of the de Leon family and Dominicans under Trujillo's cruel regime) and Oscar's
martyrdom to end it, Yunior filters the family's history in non-chronological order,
tracing the curse back to its native roots, from New Jersey back to the Dominican.  At
the beginning of the novel, he is an older Yunior ("the Watcher"), one who footnotes,
showing his scholarly teacher identity.  The younger Yunior in the middle of the novel
is much less educated, more full of machismo.

Here is how Yunior
filters Oscar's story:

1. 1974-1987 - "GhettoNerd at the End
   of the World" - Oscar Wao


2. 1982-1985 - "Wildwood" -
   Lola


3. 1955-1962 - "The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia
   Cabral" - Hypatia "Belicia" Cabral


4. 1988-1992 -
   "Sentimental Education" - Oscar Wao and Yunior


5. 1944-1946
   - "Poor Abelard" - Abelard Luis Cabral


6. 1992-1995 - "Land
   of the Lost" - Oscar Wao


7. "The Final Voyage" - Oscar
   Wao


8. "The End of the Story" - Oscar Wao and
   Yunior

Yunior is very much like Diaz himself,
part "ghetto nerd," part "jock"/"meathead."  Even though he is an outsider to the family
and does not like Oscar at first, he inevitably fulfills Oscar's destiny by becoming a
teacher and author.