Summary: 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

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

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."

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is about a Dominican family who lives in Paterson New Jersey and they have been through many tribulations in life. The theme I chose for my essay is Fuku and Love, in the novel these two themes were mainly the reason why the characters got their self in situations they could not overcome. The novel is overall about finding love and overcoming the family curse.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz is a story about an overweight nerd from a New Jersey ghetto who is an aspiring writer and who dreams of finding love. Oscar’s journey to find love is plagued by the fukú, a Dominican curse believed to be placed on his family for generations. In the Dominican society, the ‘typical’ Dominican male is characterized as being sexually active, powerful and charming, and a woman’s value is largely based on her sexuality and appeal to men. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has two main female characters, Beli and Lola, whose youths are seized by their involvement in sexual activity with the opposite sex, and whose

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

Trouble began to brew because of the woman, and it seemed logical to any normal person to discontinue the pursuit; but Oscar’s stubbornness that was frequently depicted in situations throughout the novel led him to his death. In this novel there was no other way for Oscar to die logically; he needed a big bang to bow out of his eccentric life and what better way for him, than to die for love. True love, what Oscar had been searching for his entire life and finally found, had killed him.

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.

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.

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

Being overweight, a nerd and romantic are the three reasons why Oscar’s life is miserable. Overweightness caused him to be ugly and as a result not having any relationship with any girl. Nerdliness caused him to be lonely, and in the end having no friends. And even though he was romantic, being a nerd, and overweight, kept the romantic that he was under the shadows. Being disastrously overweight caused Oscar not having any love life.

(pg 169) Oscar ran away from the help that Yunior wanted to give him in order to make him feel better and fall out of depression. Nothing ended up working out except when he had girls to talk to. When it didn’t work out he went

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