The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao By Junot Diaz

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

For instance, the protagonist of the play Ana, conquers the subject of gender roles, sexuality, and body image throughout the play. As a newly high school graduate who has been forced to work in the garment industry by her mother in order to help her sister Estela’s struggling business. A resentment starts to grow in Ana for wanting more opportunities and an education. Ana states in her writings, “It is selfish for me to not want to wake up every morning at 6:30 a.m., Saturdays included, to come work for 67 dollars a week?”(pg.10) With Ana’s carefree and headstrong demeanor she is constantly clashing with her mother on what she believes is right. Dona Carmen on the other hand is where much of these misogynistic ideals are stemmed from coming from a background and culture that has taught her to be submissive and never say no.

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.

History is impossible to change but is imperative to learn from. Throughout three novels: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, each protagonist is faced with the challenge of overcoming events in their past to positively impact their present. However, each of the protagonists are unsuccessful, which results in them repeating mistakes of their past. Jay Gatsby is impacted by his love affair with Daisy Buchanan and tries to alter events from the past in an attempt to return to a time when they were together and happy. Oscar Wao is impacted by his mother’s reckless actions; his mother’s recklessness during her youth affects how emotional and irrational Oscar becomes when falling in love. Evelina Harp is impacted by the stories that Mooshum tells her regarding decisions made based on religion and societal pressure. Gatsby, Oscar, and Evelina are each greatly impacted by uncontrollable events of their past, which forces them to either learn from those mistakes and move forward into the present or succumb to the same mistakes and be destined to repeat them.

In the novel, The House On Mango Street, women face numerous challenges in their lives. Women face abuse, objectification, and oppression. They are also subjects to the societal roles that hinders them from being free and successful. Cisneros utilizes metaphors to reveal the theme of society’s gender roles restricting the lives and sexuality of women.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the reader gets a sense of what the expectations are of Dominican men and women. Junot Díaz uses Oscar in contrast to the other male characters to present the expectations of the Dominican male. On the other hand, Díaz presents the women in the text, especially Belicia, La Inca, Lola, and Jenni, as strong characters in their own rights, but the male characters, with the exception of Oscar, have a desire to display their masculinity to maintain power over these women. It would be unfair to say that the women bring the abuse unto themselves, but rather it is their culture that makes the abuse acceptable and almost to a certain extent—expected.

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

"The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz portraits the life of Oscar de L茅on. By blending elements of reality with fantasy and science-fiction, the author paints this "cursed" journey of Oscar, doomed to act the role of the "contemporary geek". The story follows Oscar in his search to find a girl that will return his love, although he doesn't meet the society's masculinity standards. Latino masculinity is a dominant concept in the novel, for that is the main catalyst for all the actions depicted throughout the narration.

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.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz covers the issue of Love and Violence thoroughly throughout the book, and shows how anger and love influence the impulsive and reckless decisions the characters made. Searching for Zion, by Emily Raboteau on the other hand shows that love comes in different forms and may be easily misunderstood. Abelard, Belicia, Lola, and Emily show love can be a devastating force if not handled carefully and, could be very dangerous. As others commonly have, Oscar confuses passion or lust with love, which in many ways can be critical when conveyed in violence. Similarly, Emily doesn’t fully understand the love that she shares with her father and it leads her to dangerous

All authors have a purpose when writing their stories, and that is to provide a message to their readers. This message is known as theme, and literature from all around the world provide one. The themes of H.H. Munro’s The Open Window, Hernando Téllez’s Just Lather, That’s All, and Alden Nowlan’s The Fall of a City, all relate to humanity, and our roles in society. H.H Munro states that we deceive others of their reality, while Hernando Téllez demonstrates that each person has their own place in society, and Alden Nowlan discusses how one’s actions and words can affect others.

Junot Diaz, the author of “A Cheaters Guide to Love” writes his short story with many different references to anti-feminism. He writes about women in different ways to show them as powerless, and un-superior to the main character in the short story. From this short story, Diaz conveys the main characters ways when he shows the him talking about, the girl he calls to have sex with, the women at the yoga class, and the files read at the end of the story that show the fifty girls he cheated on his fiancé with. Diaz creates his main character and puts him in the second person to relate to the reader, but show his anti-feministic signs.

Like with Malvina and Gabriela, Amado depicts Glória as a woman who refuses to perform roles traditionally ascribed to women and disregards what the society expects of her. Though at first Amado emphasizes Glória’s beauty as an object for male appreciation at the window, as we learn about Glória’s inner qualities and her social transgressions we empathize with her. Glória’s beauty becomes an empowering tool since she, a disenfranchised woman, uses her body to fulfill her material needs. Like Malvina and Gabriela, Glória will not be subjected to the will of men. She wants to be her own owner and do only what she wants to do, instead of doing what others expect of her.

All characters in the novel are living in a man’s world; nevertheless, the author has tried to change this world by the help of her characters. She shows a myriad of opportunities and different paths of life that woman can take, and more importantly she does not show a perfect world, where women get everything they want, she shows a world where woman do make mistakes, but at the same time they are the ones that pay for these mistakes and correct them.