Summary Of The Brief Wondrous Life Of 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

“His nation chewed him up and spat him out like a pinon shell, and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him” (Martinez, 3). And so it starts, the story of a nineteen year old Mexican- American girl named Mary (Maria; as he only chooses to call her), who helps out and eventually falls in love with Jose Luis Alegria, a Salvadoran refugee. Martínez's story of María is told against the backdrop of the 12-year civil war in El Salvador. Maria and Jose Luis develop a friendship that slowly turns into a typical novella love affair. Through their relationship, both characters are forced to confront the violence of their

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

When Oscar is eighteen years old he meets an important girl named Ana in an SAT prep class. He immediately falls in love, but unfortunately also falls “into one of those Let’s-Be-Friends Vortexes” (Díaz 41). While Oscar is just one of her

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.

Being abused as a child and nobody wanting her because of her skin color and loosing her parents and siblings in murder, and yet she didn’t do anything to deserve this. As teen years met Belicia she gained the privilege to make decisions for her self. Until then she suffers the fukú from her own actions. Moving through the generation fukú strikes Belicia’s son Oscar after he made the decision to break one girl’s heart because he was dating two girls contemporaneously. In return he got his heart broken by the girl he chose to stay with and then everything went downhill for Oscar. Gaining weight, and casting every one away Oscar lost his popularity and became a pathetic nobody with suicidal thoughts. "Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkein and, most of all, of finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the....curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from the Dominican Republic to the United States and back again."

One thing the Gangster forgot to tell Beli is that he was married and the wife was Trujillo blood. Since Beli was so excited about the pregnancy, she was telling everyone about it and soon the news got to the palace and the Gangster wife was furious.

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

One thing all human beings, have in common is the struggle for self identity. Children are raised by parents or guardians who have struggled and fought for their own identities. In many cases, parents are still trying to figure it out, while raising their own children. Such is the case with the characters in Junot Diaz’s, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The theme of identity is conveyed through the characters’ Dominican culture, social standing, and in finding love. Oscar, Lola, and Yunior are three central characters in Oscar Wao, who’s Dominican cultural and family expectations were major obstacles as they struggled to establish their identity.

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 continued to teach at his old high school in New Jersey, sad and depressed everyday for three years, that is until his trip to Santo Domingo. Oscar forgot how much he had missed spending time in the Dominican. His mind was no longer filled to the brim with disappointment, stress and the feeling of being depressed. For the first time in a while, he saw beautiful

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.

In the story, Oscar goes through difficult situations to want to interpret the role of the Dominican man. During the story, Oscar seeks a woman who gives him love and makes him feel like a man, but does not have the masculine qualities necessary to achieve his purpose. While his friend Yunior is the opposite, that is, his role in history is a man that women are always behind him by his charms, to the point that he cannot maintain a relationship with a woman because he cannot be faithful.

To practice machismo, also known as masculinity in a Dominican culture, males have to hide their flaws and act a certain way. If men express their un-masculine nature, they will be seen as expressing their weakness. In Drown written by Junot Díaz, contains many stories about Dominican Republic male struggles as an immigrant in America. One of the struggles Díaz expresses in his text is appearing masculine in society’s eyes. From the story “Drown”, the unnamed narrator expresses what it means to be masculine. “Boyfriend” is a story about another unnamed narrator observing his neighbor’s relationship, and comparing it to his own past. Yunior, the narrator of the story “Negocios”, explains the history of his father Papi, also known as Ramón. Society creates many definitions for what it means to be masculine, leading the narrator from “Drown”, the narrator from “Boyfriend”, and Ramón struggling to choose between doing what they want for themselves, or do what society wants to see.

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