The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao Summary

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated with his family to New Jersey, where a collection of his short stories are based from. Out of that collection is a short story “Fiesta, 1980”, which was featured in The Best American Short Stories, 1997. This story is told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, who lives in the Bronx of northern New Jersey with his family. He is having trouble understanding why things are the way they are in his family. Diaz shows Yunior’s character through his cultures, his interaction with his family, and his bitterness toward his father.

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

As the stories of Beli ends abruptly and move further back to the life of Oscar, readers are able to make connections and roughly put together few pieces of the puzzle. In chapter four, Yunior introduces himself and continues to demonstrate the dictatorship through Oscar’s life in college through the development of their friendship. By comparing and contrasting the writing style of chapter four and the rest of the book, there is a noticeable difference. The beginning of the chapter explains Yunior’s involvement of the De Leon Family that “it started with me” (Diaz 167). Before Yunior meets Oscar, he announces, “Move in with him. In fucking Demarest. Home of all the weirdos and losers and freaks and fem-bots. Me, a guy who could bench 340 pounds,

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 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.

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

"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.

“FUKÚ” is an atavistic deadly curse that follows the De León family, and everything that can go wrong for them does. However, I believe that the fukú is only a consequence of their actions and a way for them to rationalize their misfortunes. The characters are using fukú as a crutch in place of taking responsibilities for their own actions. This is because they don’t want to accept the fact that things don’t always go the way they want them to. So they choose to blame the fukú for making their problems happen. So when fukú strikes a mongoose appears it comes as a character of a guardian angel with a sanguine presence. A mongoose is a weasel like animal that appears in the near death experiences of the characters. When it comes it shows a

In many cultures, especially today 's America many people do not believe in curses or do not take them seriously. However in the Dominican culture, the curse of the Fuku is life or death. If you are cursed with it you and your family will receive bad luck for all your lives. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao is a story about a Dominican family, the Cabrals, who receive this curse and the text follows the horrors they experience. The story is told from multiple points of view  members of the Cabral family and those close to them. In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz uses Different points of view of characters to explore the thematic concern of the magical element of the Fuku and how it effects each character. It is important for Diaz to use these different points of view to show the power and realism of this curse, especially in the Dominican culture.

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

Yunior represents the stereotypical Dominican male raised in the states, yet he battles with self-definition as he comes to terms with who he is on the inside as opposed to whom he is purportedly supposed to be on the outside. According to the Dominican culture, males are the picture of masculinity, known for their womanizing ways. The central conflict within Yunior is his love for the Dominican social norm versus his love for the things in his life that represented nerdiness. Yunior lifted weights and ran to keep himself physically fit and sexually promiscuous, at the same time, he enjoyed and engaged in nerdy banter with Oscar about science fiction genre, anime, fantasy and even writing. Yunior and Oscar share the same interests, which Yunior would never admit to anyone else, which is clear when Yunior says,

Yunior represents the stereotypical Dominican male raised in the states, yet he battles with self-definition as he comes to terms with who he is on the inside as opposed to who he is purportedly supposed to be on the outside. According to the Dominican culture, males are the picture of masculinity, known for their womanizing ways. The central conflict within Yunior is his love for the Dominican social norm versus his love for the things in his life that represented nerdiness. Yunior lifted weights and ran to keep himself physically fit and was sexually promiscuous, at the same time, he enjoyed and engaged in nerdy banter with Oscar about science fiction genre, anime, fantasy and even writing. Yunior and Oscar share the same interests, which Yunior would never admit to anyone else, which is clear when Yunior says,

’s name she didn’t like” (Díaz 39) is a subtle suggestion that the affair is a known, yet unmentioned occasion that simply lingers around as a speculated portion of the tale. Perhaps it is due to Yunior’s youthful age, and the fact that everything in the story is tinted by that adolescent mind, but these ambiguous telling of the story allows for the audience to investigate through their own means—which assists in the production of critical analysis for each reader to personally come to their own developed

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.

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.