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The amazing freedom that Junot Daz's writing expresses, in both its narrative richness and the explosiveness of a language that eludes any scrutiny imposed by formal decorum, owes much to the boy/adolescent involved in the scrutinizing, from his inexperienced young age and the events around him, to trace a personal reconnaissance of the psycho-geographical territory in which he moves.When in the essay "The Adolescent Novel" (1990) the psycholinguist Julia Kristeva juxtaposed adolescence and novel writing as both open systems, she recalled that the boy/adolescent figure has played a leading role in shaping the novel genre in the West as a metaphor of openness to all possibilities, a symbol of what is not yet completely formed.However, for Kristeva, the term "adolescent" does not mean so much a specific age as an "open" psychic dimension, the transitional quality of adolescence. 1 The very concepts of adventure and travel have taken on a wealth of new nuances in their tempos, thanks to the presence of enterprising kids who, more or less innocent, have endowed the modern novel with an irresistible picaresqueness.The boy/adolescent figure has continued to provide a privileged perspective even in much European and non-European postcolonial literary output, since it starkly portrays the innocence of the underdog.In the various collections of stories and in the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the modern pcaros that Junot Daz's imagination creates inhabit degraded urban environments, among the squalor of the "Caribbean City of Ruins" in Santo Domingo and the deadly slums of the "monumental garbage heaps and toxic landfills" in Parlin, New Jersey. 2 However, these spaces are dramatically amplified under Diaz's watchful eye as an extraordinary "anatomist of coloniality in the Amricas" 3 who broadens the smallest details into the extraordinary