Oscar Wao Quotes

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

Diaz strategically uses Yunior to narrate a majority of the novel. Though Yunior’s identity as the narrrater was not revealed till almost the very end of the novel, Yunior gave a very descriptive and satirical version of the life of Oscar Wao. Yunior was Oscar’s roommate at Rutgers, the boyfriend of Oscar’s sister, Lola, and the reader

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.

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

INTRO The book “the brief wondrous life of oscar wao” is set through a multitude of different eras dating back to the 1940s. Commonly placed upon families. Most older generation dominicans believe heavily in the fuku as the time periods also dictates the belief.

Oscar, who was a Dominican man, did not fit the stereotype of a Dominican man. He "couldn't play sports," did not know how to fight, and enjoyed reading science fiction and comic books (Diaz 20). Moreover, Oscar was also not particularly attractive and overweight. Unfortunately for Oscar, Dominican men were "supposed to have Atomic Level G", to "be pulling in bitches with both hands, and be athletic and muscular" (24). Furthermore, they were expected to be extremely macho and exude confidence. It was not Oscar's fault that he lacked some of these characteristics because he "didn't have no kind of father to show him the masculine ropes (15). As a result, he did not have much luck with the ladies and, "everybody noticed his lack of game", criticizing him (24). This illustrates how this stereotype and gender role was widely accepted and how those who defied it were alienated. Thus, life was extremely difficult for Oscar, who struggled with many problems throughout his life because he was not the typical Dominican

He has already been beaten up and told not to see her again by her gangster boyfriend. However, this doesn’t stop the two from seeing each other even though Ybon tries to tell Oscar they shouldn’t speak. Oscar sister, Lola flew down to try and talk to him about not seeing Ybon anymore; however, this does not help. The author tells the readers that, “Lola flew down to see him, begged him to come home, told him that he was only going to get Ybon and himself killed,” (Diaz, 319) he listened to what she had to say but didn’t go home with her. Then his mother flew down and told him he had to come home he still refused; nothing was working and Oscar still kept seeing Ybon. It is said in the book that, “he tried again to kiss her and she turned away with her head, not her body. Please don’t. He’ll kill us.” (Diaz, 320), she tries to stop Oscar but it doesn’t help. Within the next couple of days Oscar is found yet again with the men who beat him up the first time. Only this time the author tells us that Oscar doesn’t cry on the way back to the cane fields. They take Oscar into the cane field and Clives, who was in the taxi, was tied up and left at the car. Oscar was not afraid this time and started to speak to the men. The only thing the author says about this beaten is Oscar tells the men how much he loves Ybon, “He told them about Ybon and the way he loved her and how

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

When he was just seven years old he was seen crying over his first girlfriend. Before this occurred, his he was called “our little Porfirio Rubirosa” and his mother’s friends once said “look at that little macho” when they saw him with his first two girlfriend’s Maritza and Olga. In an article by Katherine Weese, she touches on Oscar’s early masculinity by saying “the novel provides description on the very young Oscar’s winning ways with women, thereby firmly establishing from the outset the connection between sexual conquest and traditional Dominican masculinity.” After he broke up with Olga and then Maritza broke up with him soon after, he was caught crying on the bus and told not to be a baby. This quickly altered his reputation and lead him through an uphill battle for years to find love again. Years later when describing Oscar’s sophomore year of high school at Don Bosco Tech, Yunior says, “Anywhere else, his triple-zero batting average with the girls might have passed unremarked, but this is a Dominican kid, in a Dominican family. Everybody noticed his lack of game and everybody offered him advice.” Unfortunately for Oscar, his lack of luck with women resulted in him repeatedly being reminded by his sister Lola that he is “going to die a virgin.” These examples offer insight on how important it is for a man in their Dominican community to be successful with women in order to hold a good

Oscar Micheaux was born on the date of October 2, 1884. The area in which he was born in was in Metropolis, Illinois. Oscar’s last name was confused on either being pronounced with Mee-show, or Mi-shaw, though it is unknown. In fact, that is one of the mysteries surrounding him. Micheaux had 4 brothers and 6 sisters, born with his father and mother there with him. His father, whose name was Calvin, could not read nor write, and left the child caring to Micheaux’s mother Bell. As a young boy, he cleaned shoes, as well as worked as a porter on a railroad. As he grew older, he became a homesteader. Surprisingly, this was in an all White area. Micheaux dealt with the problem of racism by creating his own publishing company, and selling books

Oscar’s heart was stumbled on another time by Jenni. The girl he met in Rutgers, he thought he loved her but it turns out that she had some other guy on the side. He started attacking her and now people thought of him as a crazy person. This led to him falling into depression, but his roommate Yunior helped him get back on his

In the final chapter, the significance of the letter Oscar sends to Lola about his long awaited relations to Ybón prior to his death relates to the overarching theme of love in general while also relating to the sacrifice Oscar made next. Eight months after Oscar’s death, Lola receives a letter Oscar wrote her detailing that him and Ybón were able to have a weekend away together prior to his death. In this letter, Oscar wrote that him and Ybón engaged in sexual intercourse and he experienced the intimacies of being with someone he desperately craved for so long. Based on what occurred in the prior chapter, one infers that Oscar was unwilling to let go even though he finally got something he had been waiting years for. This leads him to staying

This preliminary chapter serves to set the plot up by describing Oscar’s lack of a love life and unluckiness with girls his age due to his physical appearance. The novel begins by describing how Oscar once was a ladies’ man, even going as far as having two girlfriends at the same time. When the more physically appealing of the two: Maritza breaks up with him, that’s when Oscar’s life turns for the worse. Oscar begins to gain weight and is plagued with acne, no longer appealing to girls. Flash forward his SAT Prep class, Oscar meets a girl named Ana, and Oscar thinks he may have a chance with her until Ana’s boyfriend comes back in the picture. When reading this first chapter, I felt Diaz was deliberate in choosing this sequence of events illustrating

This shows how the calm nerdy overweight Oscar had anger in him and with a jump start he could start a violent rampage on his friends. Now let's forward to another female that he met. Jenni was her name. Oscar met her while he was in college. They hit it off right away. Jenni would walk arm in arm with Oscar and would hug him every time she would see him. Again, Oscar confused this relationship with love, but in Jenni’s eyes they were just good friends. Then one day Oscar walked in and found Jenni in bed with another guy. Oscar “went beserk. Called her a whore, and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere”(173). This is another good example of how Oscar resorted to violence. Even though he didn’t caused any harm to Jenni he did managed to scare her enough that they stopped talking completely. Towards the end of the story while Oscar is in the Dominican Republic he meets Ybon. Ybon is a local prostitute and is know to not have the best of acquaintances. In this last relationship, Ybon and Oscar hit it off. They start seeing each other, however, like his past relationship, they is always a man that gets in the way. And who was this man? El Capitan of course. El Capitan was Ybon’s Boyfriend, who she forgot to mention to

Again Oscar was lonely debilitating from all his mother's comments “you’re crying for a girl? Give her a slap and see if she respects you.” His mom says to him as she throws him to the floor. Yet he still manages to find another girl to love named Ybón but only one problem….she’s a prostitute. Better yet she already has a boyfriend and again Oscar was in danger. He didn’t want to lose this one so he tried everything he could to