The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao Analysis

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

describes the young Dominican American man who is looking for to date either a Latina girl, black girl, white girl or half girl how to judge and approach girls from various social classes and ethnicities differently based on his opinions. Throughout the story, the author uses the second person omniscient point of view to make it easier for the reader to relate to the story and assimilate the case because it’s the referring to something we have all done no matter what our ethnicity is. This point of view is necessary to the story because both he is talking to himself and giving advice to himself by using “you/your” throughout the text, therefore, as a reader, I personally, can easily put myself in the narrator’ shoes and, also, the author addresses the reader or listener directly as if he were talking to them by sharing his observations.

“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

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

William Shakespeare is one of the greatest writer in the world. He has written allot of plays which were amazing and interesting. Even today, people still try to understand and figure out Shakespeare’s master piece in his plays. Many of them are influencing writers’ around the world and one of them is called Junot Diaz. “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is the title of Junot Diaz book in which we can perceive the author’s allusion to William’s Shakespeare play in order to comprehend the book better wise. There are many allusions that Junot Diaz had in mind of the play “The Tempest” while writing his book and the one that beats them all is the resembles of the rightful Duke of Milan in the play, Prospero and Yunior, the narrator of the story of Oscar Wao. Each of their personalities, story and character’s will prove this allusion in which they are such alike and how we perceive the story and the character differently after these following information.

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,

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.

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.

Throughout Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Man Without a Face is a recurring character with no evident features. All of his scenes include an event in which he is either a mysterious spectator watching the distress around himself or joins in on the torture. His appearances throughout the story are suggestive of evil or violent incidents that are about to occur. More times than not, the acts are performed by Trujillo 's men. Almost consistently, he emerges whenever one of the main characters is in great discord. The faceless man symbolizes the foreshadowing of malicious occurrences caused by Fukú.

Growing up poor in the Dominican Republic strongly influenced the choices Yunior makes later in his life. In “Aguantando” Yunior recalls about how poverty was a part of his life. Díaz writes, “We were poor. The only way we could have been

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 chapter three of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao author Junot Diaz delves into a theme of maternal love, the sacrifices a mother makes for the sake of her child, in his telling of the story of La Inca and Beli Cabral. The two relatives are introduced to motherhood under similar tragic circumstances, with their names adding on to the list of people wronged by the Dominican Republic’s oppressive Trujillo regime. However, when it comes to the protection of their children, neither mother conducts herself as a victim. Instead, in perhaps the most trying moments of their respective lives, both women act defiantly, spurred on by the desire to save their children from a nightmarish reality. Here lies a striking similarity between the two characters, their capacity to endure anything for their children. As such, the actions of La Inca and Beli Cabral are

Estrella Alfon’s “Magnificence” and Nick Joaquin’s “The Summer Solstice” are stories heavily focused on women going against the social roles and norms which in turn challenge patriarchy; thus, it is appropriate and fitting to use a feminist approach to analyze the said stories. Moreover, using a feminist criticism is more fitting since the female protagonists of the stories defy the socially constructed view of femininity and masculinity and in both stories, oppression or objectification of women is greatly exhibited. In order to unravel and comprehend the two stories, three questions will be tackled: (a) How is the relationship between men and women portrayed? (b) What are the power relationships between men and women? (c) How are male and female roles defined? “Magnificence” and “The Summer Solstice” are two stories which demonstrate

In recent discussions, the novels “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, has given rise to a controversial question: whether women should be labeled as incomplete and an uncertainty without men. At the same time, some have argued and questioned the intention of the author – i.e., whether Diaz holds any respect for women, at all. In fact, there has been a collective attempt to convey that men can control women, and by controlling them (women), men are able to regulate love itself, and keep them “protected”, as can be seen through the author’s methodical choice of words such as “bitch’, “raging”, “useless woman”, “fea”, “idiota”, “vividness” and “worthless”. Moreover, though initially it may appear that the aforementioned author has taken a defensive stance when he labels women as imperfect human beings, setting the boundaries, and painting women as a disparaging object, in reality, however, the said author is heavily afflicted by thoughts of death, rendering him to be in a constant internal conflict between himself, in search of love, leaving us to further question whether his hostility towards women is from an obdurate standpoint, wounded by personal experience, or is he just merely trying to hypnotize his readers by confining the latter to only see conservative society through his eyes.