What Makes Oppa Homeless Style So Perfect Is The Escalation Of Disbelief. We Begin With The Waitress

What makes Oppa Homeless Style so perfect is the escalation of disbelief. We begin with the waitress giving a twenty to a homeless man, passing on the generosity of her customers. This is unusual, but not inherently implausible , and we may expect some corny but heartwarming conversation to follow.

Then it introduces the Dipshit, an impossible strawman who plants the first seeds of doubt. The reader now stops thinking about this as a narration of true events and begins to wonder how much the heroine has embroidered. A charitable person might suggest that somebody did indeed object to her donation, and she invented only the following argument. As the Dipshit’s statements become ever more exaggerated and absurd, however, we increasingly suspect that even that was the product of a fertile imagination.

Finally, the homeless man begins to dance, and we realize that he never existed, either. The narrator stretches our willingness to believe like silly putty: for some readers, it simply snaps, while for others, it drifts apart gently after dwindling to an almost invisible thread. Oppa Homeless Style is a study of the unreliable narrator and the fine line past which a story becomes too much to swallow. Each reader has a different experience of where that crucial point lies.