From an interview with Junot Díaz (http://labloga.blogspot.com/2007/10/guest-interview-junot-daz.html)
Q. I had chills whenever the mongoose appeared. What does the mongoose means to you and in relation to DR history?
A.
The mongoose is funny because he’s my favorite character. He is the
only real character. In the Díaz family cosmology, he’s the only real
character in the whole book.
There’s a story my mom tells about
encountering a mongoose. She was lost once so that in some ways inspired
it. That character comes out of a childhood in the Dominican Republic
being exposed to mongoose. And you see them and as a kid [but] you’ve
never seen anything like it. They are extremely fast, extremely social,
and clever.
And then of course you discover that they are
immigrants to the island. There was something that pulled me about the
image of another transplant - who is a really wild little trickster. In
"Oscar," there is the actual footnote on the mongoose, where the
narrator says that these could also be aliens.
I couldn’t explain
it while I was writing it, but there was something about this family’s
history that provoked an assistant from this mongoose character. It is
almost as if because their life was so shitty, they are able to gain
this luminous intervention from what might be an alien. That is what I
thought was funny because some people have said, oh, this magic realism
bit. And I am like, oh my God, it’s the exact opposite of it.
Also a story from The Jungle Book that stars a mongoose - as a protector of the family from snakes
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mongoose/rtt.html
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