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Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

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The fiction novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao takes into account of the plentiful Dominican stereotypes that are within their culture. The author, Junot Diaz, addresses those stereotypes throughout the novel. The most notable of these stereotypes is the role of machismo (masculinity) in the book. Many probably wonder as to why Junot Diaz emphasizes the Dominican male stereotypes, but the purpose behind it is that the stereotypes take part in the standards of the Dominican culture. The Dominican people look at masculinity as a level they want to achieve. Every Dominican male wants to attain the social status of being very masculine in the novel. Diaz has different ways of presenting Dominican males attempting to reach that status of machismo. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao consists of plenty of characters that are seeking a higher status of machismo. Some look up to others. An example of this is Trujillo. The way that Diaz presents Trujillo in the passage shows that Trujillo is the definition of a “true Dominican male”. Yunior speaks of Trujillo, “Dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass” (Diaz 217). Trujillo is on the top of the chain of machismo. In effect, since Trujillo is on the top, characters such as Yunior sometimes acknowledge this and use it to look up to …show more content…

Oscar knew that the Capitan would come hurt him but he was too focused on Ybon. He was too focused on finally becoming a man he was willing to die for it. Oscar’s journal states “So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!” (335). Oscar died to prove to people that he was a man like them. With Diaz including this in the novel, it strengthens the point of Dominican standards. Diaz stressed on including this so the audience can know how important it is to be masculine in the Dominican

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