In an attempt to come up with something more substantial for my last blog post than I’ve done with other blogposts I did a general search on the internet for The Brief Wondorous Life of Oscar Wao. Of course, one of the first links to pop up is a wikipedia article about the this novel we just read. They of course mention the comparison between Oscar Wao and Oscar Wilde, but they also mentioned The Short Happy Life of Francis Macombre and the likeness in titles between these two stories. So I went back and read over this short story by Ernest Hemingway and found what I believe to be a very interesting similarity between the two characters.
As a reader, we get to know both characters for different amounts of time but we see both men come into their manhood and we see both men die at the hands of a woman. For Oscar his manhood is reached finally by losing his virginity to Ybón. For Francis, he came into his own when he felt he had made up for his cowardice at running from a lion by successfully killing two (and a half) buffalo with little help. Oscar’s newfound manhood allowed him to stand up for his love and Francis to stand up for his life, in a way. Wilson, the hired hunter in The Short Happy Life, even tells Francis’s wife that he would have left her because of this new found confidence and coming into manhood that Francis experienced immediately before his death, and potential murder at the hands of his wife. Oscar is killed for his love at the hands of Ybón’sangry lover, Francis for his lack of love and at the hands of his own wife who had ceased to be a faithful lover.
What is really interesting to note between the titles is that it begs to be read not as the lives of these men being short but rather the happy/wonderous parts of their lives were short/brief. Both characters live less once they achieve satisfaction and happiness. It seems for both that the span of their lives before discovering what it meant to be a man was drawn out and to a certain degree dull. The end of both of their lives then becomes bittersweet as we are glad of their achievement and sad at their demise, but at the least they conquered their fears.