Junot Diaz a bilingual writer plays with language and culture to develop a story that he believes represents Dominican Republic. Oscar Wao an opponent of everything that we can find in a typical Dominican Macho finds love and death in the country where everything started. Amor is a word that is used only a couple of times in the novel but has a great meaning behind that develops to the curse itself and a series of unfortunate events.
The word love is completely common. For example, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao it can be found 43 times. But the word amor which is the same word but translated to Spanish is only used 8 times. The word love has a translation to Spanish language, for instance there must be a reason why the author uses both languages. It is a word that everyone believes leads to a happy ending.
The first time that the word “amor” appears in the novel it is used in a title which states: “Amor de Pendejo.” I realized that this word can have a way to be translated to English in which case there should be a reason why it was used in Spanish in the first place. There is a common saying in Hispanic culture that uses some of this words, “Amor de lejos amor de pendejos,” which means that if you have a
…show more content…
Each one of the characters has to choose if love is going to be their Fuku or Zafa. If they choose love as their Zafa they would live a life without real love from a partner. Some characters chosen love as their Zafa, such as Beli, Lola and La Inca. However, the curse gives them the option of live a life with love for a couple of time until they found death, such as Abelard and Oscar. The use of amor in the novel helps the reader to understand that this is when the curse starts for every character and they eventually choose if they want a live without love or die while they are in
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is not a happy book. The Author, Junot Diaz, does a great job fooling the reader into believing the story is about the De Leon family, specifically Oscar who is an over weight nerd trying to find the love of his life, but due to a family “fuku” or curse Oscar is having a lot of trouble doing so. Instead, the story actually portrays the dark history of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Upon reading the stories of Oscar’s relatives the reader feels a powerful message of fear and oppression due to the actions of the Trujillo regime. Even after the demise of
Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated with his family to New Jersey, where a collection of his short stories are based from. Out of that collection is a short story “Fiesta, 1980”, which was featured in The Best American Short Stories, 1997. This story is told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, who lives in the Bronx of northern New Jersey with his family. He is having trouble understanding why things are the way they are in his family. Diaz shows Yunior’s character through his cultures, his interaction with his family, and his bitterness toward his father.
In Diaz’s novel we see the boy Oscar who seeks for love but cannot receive it, a woman who is self assured and tough due to the lack of love from a parent as a young girl, and a boy who is afraid to devote himself to another woman, and lets go of the greatest gift when he had it laying in the palm of his hands. Oscar, due to his deep depression, allows a few men to lead him to his death, because Oscar, in his mind, was dying for a woman he “loved”. Love makes you do crazy things, it makes you irrational, it makes you reckless ,like Oscar, vulnerable, as Lola once was, and it could even make you end up alone, like Yunior. It is the greatest force of nature, it is what makes the world go round and spin as it does. We love, love, we need love, and we seek love because it is what makes us feel alive, it gives us courage, happiness, fulfillment and an endless list of what every human being wants. It is the
Oscar Wao is a young Dominican boy who struggles to achieve what most straight Dominican boys his age already have—a lady. Being obese and completely obsessed with all things nerdy, he loses touch with his “Dominican side”. He becomes naive—to the point that even a girl who checks out his groceries seems like the 'one' for him. He
In the essay, “Love’s Vocabulary,” Diane Ackerman communicates the idea through figurative language, that love is an emotion that is seen universally, but no one can explain what it is. For instance, the analogy about music conveys Ackerman’s idea as it suggests that every person from different time periods and locations recognize love just as they recognize music, but they cannot comprehend its meaning.
Junot Diaz, in his novel “This Is How You Lose Her”, tells us the story of a Dominican inhabitant of New Jersey, Yunior, as he attempts to fix his love life through several anecdotes. There is clear use of worldbuilding to help pull the reader into Yunior’s world and portray unknown environments to those who have not seen them before. It’s something most visible in science fiction and fantasy writing, genres that Diaz had writing about better and heavily used in his realist fiction. Here he allows for us to better experience the life in Central Jersey and all the other locations Yunior is described to have been. With this he conveys the ideas of foreignness and the feeling of being an outsider far away from his home country of the Dominican Republic. As a fiction writer, it helps him accomplish the most important thing for an author which is to allow the reader to understand and immerse himself in the writing while not delving into total fiction. His use of worldbuilding isn’t one that tries to be overly dramatic or descriptive, he more so just attempts to push out the facts in an understandable way.
Junot Diaz’s novel truly does tell the brief story of the wondrous life of Oscar de Léon, our Dominican-American protagonist, better known as Oscar Wao. Weighing in at 245 pounds, our hopeless romantic loves comic books, writes science-fiction in all of his spare time, and, as described by our homodiegetic narrator Yunior, is a “loser with a capital L” (Diaz 17). While the title might allude that this is a story solely about Oscar, Diaz also delves deep into the lives of those closest to him. This narrative tells the epic journey of Oscar, as well as his family members, and how their experiences in the United States and Dominican Republic come together full-circle at the end of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with the help of some postmodern techniques. As an immigrant himself, Diaz is able to use his journey to bring attention to the cultural stereotypes of his characters, but unlike many bildungsroman writings, our character’s coming of age story does not provide him with enough spiritual learnings to give him the quintessential happy ending. The overall growth of Oscar only reveals the flaws in his culture, a fatal flaw in his case. Because Oscar does not comply with the Dominican standards, he faces heavy repercussions in his life.
Each short chapter story written by Junot Diaz presents different key ideas and themes that can easily be identified when reading and analyzing important details contained in his short personal fiction. To begin with, language is one of the important key themes that Junot Diaz focuses on his story. Throughout the chapters, one is able to see a combination of words that contain a mixture of slang in both English and Spanish. Likewise, in his short stories, Diaz includes a variety of Spanish words that are used in his home country as well as other Latin American countries.
The use of these metaphors and fantasy style writing has a cultural basis in Latin America, but they also serve another purpose. The mystical imagery is a way to code information that would be too dangerous to be explicitly written, to hide it from institutions of power that may pose a threat to the authors. These metaphors serve as a secret language that will be able to speak about the facts of the current political climate without running the risk of explicitly speaking about it. In the novel’s case, images such as the ‘paginas en blanco’, the faceless men, or the science fiction style speech all serve to express ideas that may seem dangerous if they were blatantly spoken outright. The ‘paginas en blanco’ describe information that is lost or erased by the Trujillo regime. To mention outright that the Trujillato had expunged certain details is history, in this case about Oscar’s family past, would lead an author to the same fate that Abelard had in the prison. The faceless men are avatars for the free-flowing power that belongs to the current dictators or structures of rule. This metaphor shows the key essential fact about the Trujillo regime, that while Trujillo was the puppet in this ruler ship, he was not responsible for the rise in power. That responsibility belongs to the government that seeded him in power to prevent communist insurgency in the Dominican Republic, in other words, our own government. This is alluded to when Yunior first mentions Abelard’s manuscript, the historical documents that planned to reveal the truth about the Trujillo administration. By using science fiction style speech, Yunior tells us “That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!” (245) The most prominent use of a mystical
The novel The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao is a fictional story that captures the imagination of the reader through fantasy scenes in the narration. Notably, the book talks about the life of Oscar Wao, who wants to experience love, but his personality puts off the women that he approaches. In addition, the author has managed to construct the story by encompassing various aspects of the main character’s life. Importantly, the political environment is set in the Dominican Republic that is under the rule of an iron-fisted dictator Rafael Trujillo in the 1930s (Díaz 32). As such, the citizens live in terror and are unable to express their feelings freely. Insightfully, the writer alternates the plot between New York and Dominica
“This Is How You Lose Her,” Diaz makes references to the culture and setting of the Dominican Republic through
Esquivel showed love in a whole other aspect from life in the movie and novel “Like Water for Chocolate”. This movie and novel is about monthly installments with recipes, romances, and home remedies. Love was very powerful and changed everybody’s life, it kept some people around, made some people leave and it even made some people die. Love is something that can take over someone’s mind, soul and body. When two people are in love no one and nothing can get in the way of those two individuals from being together. When you’re in love you’ll do just about anything to keep yourself and the one you love happy. For example in “Like Water for Chocolate” Pedro was so in love with Tita that’s when it came time
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel composed by Junot Diaz, Oscar Wao tells in what presents to be an oral conversation, consisting in part youth with popular cultural references to fantasy and sci-fi, or American hip-hop, and of Spanish slang extracted from the language of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and South American. Diaz uses transnational as a critique contributing to the inspection of the achievements and the limitations of multiculturalism and its academic phenomenon, ethnic studies. He included numerous allusions to a vast British and American customs of fantasy and comic books, making The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a creative work of the category that indicates the diversity of cultural influences that
This movie demonstrates the authority of Juan Rosas through love and relationships. In the reading
Love could be considered one of the most common themes used in any piece of art seen today. From poems to movies, love can be seen in some type of form or fashion in any work. Love can be seen even in pieces that do not focus on love as its sole theme. Any person can relate to the theme of love because love starts from birth and continues until death. It can be as simple a love as love for a mother or as complex as love for a significant other.