Theme Of Machismo In 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

puts it, working with animals was just like working with his wife. As noted by one researcher’s subject, “Over there [in Mexico] one has command over them, and scolds them and all that. But not here; if she feels that things don’t suit her, she gets out and leaves.” (Pena, 1991). These two examples of men’s views about women are not shared by them only, but shared by many Mexican males. How much alcohol is being consume might determine the level of machismo. a scholar once said “The negative aspects of machismo can result in heavy drinking and the pursuit of high-risk activities, leading to domestic violence and HIV/AIDS” (Galanti, 2003). During a survey a bunch of Hispanic male were ask to define machismo and one of them said “Machismo means that you can drink, that you can party all night and maintain. The one that is up the

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."

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.

Yunior’s attitude regarding women and relationships is an inadvertent consequence of observing his own father’s degradation of their family unit. The little interaction between Yunior and his father seldomly, if ever, give the impression of a loving and nurturing father figure. Yunior himself even goes so far as to mention: “he said little to us that wasn't disciplinary” (Diaz 129). As a result, Yunior’s developing sense of kinship or lack thereof is directly affected by the actions of his father,

The connection between stereotypes and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the role of gender, sexuality that takes place among Oscar and society. It is how Oscar feels after he has been mocked, humilliated, hurt, etc... Oscar as a Dominican, he has to be in good shape and sexy according to the tipical Dominican Republic stereotype. He obligatory have to be a good-looking guy otherwise he was a fake Dominican. But Oscar wasn’t like every Dominican, he was different. He “had none of the High Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it”(20). He was indeed different, but different doesn’t mean to be ugly, or weird, it means that he is just a different type of person. He was an introvert, what

Sexuality in traditional Dominican culture dominates Diaz’s novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” The descriptions and experiences of the main characters in the novel, namely, Oscar, Lola, Beli and Yunior highlight the theme of sexuality in Dominican culture. Yunior is the hyper-masculine narrator who presents sexuality in terms of the power and expectation of Dominican masculinity (Asencio 108). He embodies the ‘el machismo’ masculinity stereotype prevalent in Dominican culture where men have high sex drive and the power to dominate women by controlling their sexuality through violence, coercion, and verbal aggression. Oscar contradicts this machismo power by appearing emasculated like a woman. This shows that women have lower social standing compared to men, even lower than that of weak men like Oscar in Dominican culture. Sexuality plays a central role in Diaz’s novel to illustrate the dominance of masculinity over women in Dominican culture.

Oscar parked outside Ybón’s house and when he saw her “[h]is heart seized like a bad leg and for a moment he thought about letting the whole thing go, about returning to Bosco and getting on with his miserable life, but then she stooped over, as if the whole world was watching, and that settled it,” accentuating how much Oscar truly is captivated by Ybón due to the extreme feelings of nervousness he experiences when he was about to approach her and how these emotions drove him to want to accomplish his goal even more (Díaz 315). The simile used to describe how “[h]is heart seized like a bad leg” further describes how important this moment was for Oscar and by using this simile, the author is able to display Oscar’s determination by how he was able to overcome his intense nerves in this moment just to declare his deep feelings for Ybón, as well as overcoming his other major insecurities like being obese or being a nerd (Díaz 315). Oscar’s persistent pursuit of love finally pays off and enables him to not only experience a sexual experience but to also share intimate moments with another person who has the same feelings toward him, however, as a result from this relationship, Oscar is

Gender and identity are both unique features that make up a person. Society has expectations on how everyone should act, especially when it comes to a person’s gender and gender roles. In “The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, the character Oscar is conflicted with his identity and with his masculinity. The people around him are constantly attacking him for not living up to the standards that society has put into place. Gender and identity are themes that each character in the story struggles with.

A turning point in Oscars future was when La Inca went to find Beli and save her from the family who locked her in a chicken coop. That was incredibly important because if La Inca hadn’t gone and got Beli then Beli wouldn’t have had to flee to America and Oscar wouldn’t have been born at all. Diaz chose specific points in the book to tell the story of Beli while also telling the story of Oscar to show how Beli’s life influenced Oscar. The use of Yunior as a narrator in this story is unique but it provides the reader with a bird's eye view of Beli’s past and lets the reader see how it changed Oscar. Yunior’s role shows the reader stories of people’s past that we wouldn’t otherwise have known if Yunior or Oscar had told the story from a first person point of view.

In Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, he is telling the story of a Dominican family but mainly about the son, Oscar de Leon. The book opens with the story of Oscar as a child and him having two girlfriends at the same time. The older people in town see him as a ladies man and encourage him. The boy and the two girls all break up and his life seemed to be on a steady decline since then. He grows up to become a nerdy, fat, and awkward adolescence with few friends and even less interest from girls. This phase persists throughout his life and he never develops out of the nerdy boy he was as a child. The Dominican Republic was a hostile and poor place during the time of the novel. The dictator Trujillo controls the lives of the

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the author presents the reader with recurring mysterious images and characters. In visual art, repetition of colors, shapes and textures is used to create unity, emphasis and rhythm. Because Diaz is painting his story with words he is using the literary device of repetition for the same reasons, for emphasis, to create a rhythm and to tie the account together. The narrative of Oscar and the Cabral and De Leon families and friends moves back and forth in time and the repetition of images with slight variations is a powerful way of maintaining and connecting the story line or theme in what may seem like a jumble of events. The “man with no face” and “paginas en blanco” , ‘blank pages’ or missing words are just a few of the recurring symbols used to connect past, present and further and to emphasize the predictable yet random feelings and consequences of 'Fuku'. By looking more closely at how and why these symbols were used, the major theme represented in the story of Oscar’s wonderful life, becomes apparent.

Nothing, culturally relevant, ever came easy to Oscar Wao. Oscar came from a Dominican family where looks, girls and sex came before anything else. When he didn 't fit into the mold of, what he thought was, the typical Dominican, he decided that a curse plagued him. His biggest concern, going into college and driven by hormones, was girls – or the lack thereof. When his two best friends got girlfriends senior year and refused to help set him up with one of their friends, he realized that, “his fucked-up comic-book-reading, role-playing-game-loving, no-sports-playing-friends were embarrassed by him,” and that realization opened his eyes to what was important to him in his life (Díaz 29). He realized that he loved writing and if he wanted to succeed in it, he had to commit everything to it. Throughout his life, at least the sliver that we see, the only things that he succeeded at where the things that he committed everything to, mainly his writing. It gave him a reason to live and that feeling of fulfilment drove him to commit even more to it. For the majority of his life, nothing besides writing gave him that fulfillment until he met Yebon, a beautiful Dominican girl who Oscar subsequently fell in love with. Earlier in the story when Oscar lost meaning, after having his heart broken by La Jablesse, he tried to kill himself. After he survived, he started writing again and became re-committed to it, it gave him the strength to recover and move on. When he met Yebon, he pursued

From the first page, we know that Oscar was once a normal boy, who did normal Dominican things with his normal Dominican family. All the girls, “His sister Lola’s friends, his mother’s friends, even their neighbor, Mari Colon, a thirty-something postal employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a bell for an ass- all purportedly fell for him.” (Pg. 13) This shows that when he was young, he was quite the charmer. His youth was his golden age, as the book refers to it, which ended when he was seven. The beginning of the end was when he dated two girls at once. This ended with him getting his heart broken by a beautiful girl named Maritza and to Oscar, that is when his life turned for the worse.

This film begins by telling its viewers about a young girl, Evita, growing up in a difficult time. As a girl who was born from a lower class woman and a ranch owner, Evita had a difficult time being accepted by the society she lived in. Her and her mother and siblings lived in poor conditions and struggled very much. Growing up in these conditions appeared to have given Evita the strength and persistence to make a better life for herself. Evita left her home at a young age in hopes of fulfilling her dream of becoming a wealthy actress. It was said that Evita used her beauty and charm to achieve her goals. She would use men of power to get what she wanted and then leave them for another. This gave her a promiscuous reputation. After