Nothing, Culturally Relevant, Ever Came Easy For Oscar Wao

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

Throughout the novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar falls in love with several girls throughout his life whom never love him back. This is partially due to Oscar’s love for women that are extremely out of his league. These women are beautiful and desire the stereotypical man which is the opposite of overweight, nerdy Oscar. Several songs display the scenes throughout Oscar’s life in which he falls head over heels for women that would never publicly date him.

Oscar is the antithesis of his culture’s idea of manliness. In the beginning we meet an Oscar who is called “Porfirio Rubirosa” (21). Everyone is proud of the boy because this is exactly what he needs to be to be a Dominican man. Men from Dominican Republic, and perhaps Spanish Caribbean men, are expected to take care of their family especially their mothers and sisters, yet they are also expected to be “playboys” who have multiple women. as the first line of the story communicates, “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly-bachetero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock” (21). Oscar is the type of man who women say they want; kind, sensitive, considerate, smart, and romantic. He truly want to find true

The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is an enthralling novel about a young Dominican boy, named Oscar, who is growing up in a New Jersey ghetto. Oscar is an overweight nerd who is constantly getting attracted to any pretty girl he lays his eyes on. Unfortunately for him, Oscar isn’t just overweight, he’s tragically overweight. However, Oscar’s real true love is writing. He absolutely loves writing, and is always creating stories when he is not playing his “geeky” video games. Oscar’s goal is to become a famous and accomplished writer, so he dedicates most of his time to writing. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao follows his family’s journey from the Dominican Republic to the United States, and Oscar’s valiant attempts to find love.

Oscar de Leon from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a character that be classified as a member of many different types of social groups. He is characterized as a Dominican, a

Altering the reader’s perception of characters and events, an otherwise powerless narrator is able to fulfill their desire for power. This narrative power is exhibited by the narrators in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz utilizes different narrators, each with distinct language and perspectives illustrating the possibilities of narrative power. Despite his best efforts to “share some of his playerly wisdom” (173) and “fix Oscar’s life”, Yunior is unable to convince Oscar turn his life around and is ultimately powerless with those he cares about(175). Yunior not only failed to convince Oscar to run for more than a few days but also failed on many attempts to persuade Oscar to abort his “Battle of the Planets routine” (183). This failure to change Oscar’s life is furthered when Oscar “jumped of the New Brunswick train bridge” (191). Not only had Yunior failed to his “Oscar Redemption Program” and prevent his attempted suicide but also Yunior was repeatedly rejected by Lola. “The opposite of the girls [Yunior] usually macked on”, Lola was “easy to care about” (168). Despite Yunior’s success with many girls

The conclusion of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is satisfying because the ending revolved around Oscar’s death, the separate stories of the novel now intertwined because of him. His transformation and new personality was ultimately the cause of his death, but in a sense it can be considered happy because it seems just right. Oscar becomes a new person and breaks free of his nerdy and rejected persona. Diaz seamlessly weaves the ending of Oscar Wao’s story and all the characters around him due to their natures and the preceding actions. The ending of this novel is convincing and logical because of Oscar’s new transformation which led him to do things which he would have not done before. These things that he did, most specifically pursuing a woman he should not have, led him to his death. Despite the morbid ending, it is not unreasonable; it is certainly logical and therefore satisfying to the

Oscar Wao is without doubt the Zafa to the Fuku and let me tell you why. In the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, Oscar lives a life full of regret, sorrow and hopelessness. As Dominican male, getting girls is not just a fun thing to say around friends. It is part of the Dominican lifestyle. If you can “get girls,” you are respected and are living the so called Dominican way. For Oscar, he thought he had it all when he was young. He had the girls and the confidence. That is, until, he hit his teens...Oscar suffered a very tough breakup that would not just affect him for a week or so, but for about the next fifteen years of his life. Oscar turned to Science-Fiction, help him get through. He loved everything from

As it unfolds in "The Golden Age" section, Oscar is part of a Dominican-American family that lives in Paterson, New Jersey. As a child he is pushed forward to the opposite sex by his mother, which is very proud about his early signs of virility. This is seen as one of the standing characteristics of Dominican males. Further on, we watch the decline of Oscar's success with women as he gains weight and he deepens himself in literature and isolation. This is caused by Maritza's rejection which affected him profoundly.

Everything begins when Oscar at the age of seven his mother finds him crying for a girl and his mother tells him to be respected by women, before this event Oscar was seen in the community as a small playboy Dominican Rubirosa, he has a relationship with two girls at the same time for a week, a week before the girls ask him to have to choose which of the two is going to stay and then the two left him.it can be said that from that moment everything began.

Oscar lived in a poor nigborhood, it seemed like there was a lot of crime and violence. He lived in a poor social class. When a person is around a lot of crime usually they begin to commit it themselves as a survival tactic. Oscar was a drug dealer and went to jail for it. When Oscar got out of jail he still had a stigma as a drug dealer. Oscar didn’t want to be known as a drug dealer, he wanted to better his life. Oscar took affirmative action by throwing way his drugs because he wanted to live an honest life where his family wont is in danger anymore epically his daughter. I think Oscar would have eventually resorted back to drug dealing because he didn’t have a job or any college education. In our society it is extremely difficult to survive on minimum wage. Even though Oscar may not want to sell drugs anymore it would be fast money and he won’t have to struggle to survive. In the movie Oscar meets a white couple and the white man was in a similar situation as Oscar. The white man was breaking the law and committing an index crime to survive. He didn’t deal with any bad sanctions, I believe because he was in a higher social class then Oscar. Most of the time social control by authority is focused on lower classes because lower class people have a higher chance of committing a

Oscar is not the typical Dominican man that his family expects him to be. He is considered to be a nerd which leads to the lack of romance in his adolescence and adulthood. In an article by Joori Joyce Lee it says: “Growing up as a ghetto nerd, or "a smart kid in a poor-ass community," Diaz felt like a mutant because he found himself to be an outsider in both the Dominican subculture and mainstream white American society.” (Lee, pg 23). Oscar could never really fit in with his peers or even with Dominicans, he is always considered an outsider to them. “Everybody noticed his lack of game and because they were Dominican everybody talked about it.” (Diaz, pg. 24). His own family recognizes his lack of masculinity that a Dominican man should have. Even Oscar’s sister Lola encourages him to lose weight and to become more masculine in order to get a girlfriend. His uncle Rudolfo is a prime example of what society expects every

In popular culture and mainstream media, women are often portrayed as overtly sexual objects that are obligated to entertain the idea of patriarchy. The strong outward appearances and characteristics of women in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz are deceiving, as they do not reveal their powerlessness against men. Throughout the entire book, women are described and seen as sexual objects through the eyes of Yunior, Oscar, and various other men. In the first chapter, Oscar and his peers treat women like they are disposable, despite their desire and need for them. This negative trend is reinforced in the next two chapters, as the narrators shamelessly describe women by emphasizing their feminine traits whilst simultaneously displaying the idea of male dominance. In addition, strong-willed women like Beli and Lola refuse to succumb to such lustful treatment, but when they are tempted with the fantasy of true love, they immediately lose their strength and surrender. In the last few chapters, these ideas are further reinforced through the sexual desire that Oscar possesses. He meets Ybon, a prostitute with a boyfriend, and immediately falls in love. Ybon is committed to her boyfriend, but because of the way she is seen in a patriarchal system, she gives in to the forbidden love that Oscar offers. No matter how strong these women were within the story, they always let the men have their way. In the end, Oscar dies because of his uncontrollable desire for love. The

Meet Oscar de León. Once upon a time, in elementary school, Oscar was a slick Dominican kid who seemed to have a typical life ahead of him. Then, around the time he hit puberty, Oscar gained a whole lot of weight, became awkward both physically and socially, and got deeply interested in things that made him an outcast among his peers (sci-fi novels, comics, Dungeons & Dragons, writing novels, etc.). A particularly unfortunate Dr. Who Halloween costume earns him the nickname Oscar Wao for the costume's resemblance to another Oscar: playwright Oscar Wilde (Wao being a Dominican spin on the surname). His few friends are embarrassed by him, girls want nothing to do with him, and everywhere he goes Oscar finds nothing but derision and hostility.

The decision to go against conformity is the only way to escape the situation that one is in, as shown in Díaz’s novel and Malala’s journey. Oscar, the main protagonist of Díaz’s novel, is frequently told by the people around him who he is and who he must be, sparking a deep conflict within Oscar. “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cat’s everybody’s always going on about ... dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him)” (Díaz, 11). From the beginning of the book, Oscar is pinned as an unfavorable choice for women. He notices this when girls reject him for the way he looks and his family members critique his lack of “improvement”. The Dominican expectation tells men they should be charming and a lothario however Oscar is neither. Oscar has the decision to conform to or reject the expectations. As it is more difficult to push the expectations away, Oscar spends his life chasing women in hopes of sex, which is also