Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, set in the late 1900’s, tells a story of Oscar Wao, an overweight Dominican “ghetto nerd”, his mother and rebellious sister who live together in Paterson, New Jersey. Throughout the novel Diaz incorporates many different stories about each character that show acts of resistance. One of the most prominent stories of resistance in the novel is through Oscar’s mom; Beli, who is prompted by great tragedy, known as the Trujillo curse, to love atomically and thus follows a dangerous path. Beli’s family history plays a large role in her choices that eventually compel her into a different life than what her adopted mother, La Inca, had wanted for her.
Beli resisting La Inca portrays her downfall, because Beli makes choices against La Inca’s desires that will harm her. She is unaware of her history and background of the Abelard family, other than the fact that La Inca continuously tells Beli that her father was a doctor and her mother was a nurse. Abelard Luis Cabral was Oscar and Lola’s grandfather, the man who said something bad about Trujillo, thus eventually sending the fukú curse down to Beli. Diaz writes “In those long days-before delincuencia and bank failures, before Diaspora- the Cabrals were numbered among the High of the Land “(211). The Cabral’s held a high place in society, but it was not until Abelard Cabral upset Trujillo that he was sentenced to the curse of Trujillo’s reign. The power of Trujillo is so strong it
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
As children grow up in a dysfunctional family, they experience trauma and pain from their parent’s actions, words, and attitudes. With this trauma experienced, they grew up changed; different from other children. The parent’s behavior affects them and whether they like it or not, sometimes it can influence them, and they can react against it or can repeat it. In Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980”, is presented this theme of the dysfunctional family. The author presents a story of an adolescent Latin boy called Junior, who narrates the chronicles of his dysfunctional family, a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic driving to a party in the Bronx, New York City. “Papi had been with
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.
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.
Journal Entry-The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao A question that the book The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao raised for me was how the characters in the book tried to control their identity against the power of the fuku? The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about a boy named Oscar de Leon, he's from a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Oscar is the hero in the book as he is in search for his love. The Country of Dominican Republic is under a dictatorship by Rafael Trujillo.
Description of characters, in any story, goes well beyond their physical traits or personality. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is a novel in which each character possesses their own multifaceted culture. The various qualities that make up each unique character are brought to life through Diaz’ utilization of juxtaposition, diction, and tone throughout the literary work.
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
To begin, one must examine the characterization of our protagonist, Oscar. In the novel Oscar is an ample, second generation Dominican living in New Jersey. He loves to write and read science-fiction and he spends the
One thing all human beings have in common is the struggle for self identity. Children are raised by parents or guardians who have struggled and fought for their own identities. In many cases, parents are still trying to figure it out, while raising their own children. Such is the case with the characters in Junot Diaz’s, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The theme of identity is conveyed through the characters’ Dominican culture, social standing, and in finding love. Oscar, Lola, and Yunior are three central characters in Oscar Wao, who’s Dominican cultural and familial expectations were major obstacles as they struggled to establish their identity.
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.
Gender stereotypes or abnormalities are not always apparent at first when reading a book. But it does become apparent when something is shown that is the opposite of what society thinks they should be. Gender is a serious issue that most people do not address because they only think of gender as what they were taught their whole lives. Then when someone does not meet these stereotypes they are seen as an outsider and are ostracized. This can be seen in the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when looking into the life of the main character Oscar.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the author, Junot Díaz, uses a combination of english, spanish, and spanglish in his writing. In this book he portrays the life of Oscar, a fat Dominican living the United States. His writing style is odd in comparison to that of almost all other literary works in that sense, but it also makes his book unique. Díaz uses the colloquial language mixed with traditional writing and spanish slang to emphasize his upbringing as a child born in the Dominican Republic but living in New Jersey; even his many references to science fiction and fantasy in the narrative of his high school years serve their purpose to help the reader create a better picture of Oscar’s adolescence and how he turns away from the societal norms applied to Dominican men. The way Díaz writes also makes those reading feel like an immigrant, which is how he felt all throughout his childhood and intended to bring to the book while writing it.
In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, one crucial point in the novel is in its questioning of the well-known tension between writers and dictators. The narrator problematizes the conventional idea that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists by claiming that both “just know competition when they see it.... Like, after all, recognizes like” (Díaz, 97). The idea that writers and dictators share similarities is contradictory by itself; but, Díaz plays with this idea through his representation of the Historical Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo and characters such as Yunior. While the ties between these two political and creative powers can be made clear through observations of Díaz’s story, the same connection can also be made apparent in other works of art. Written by Hector Oesterheld and drawn by Francisco Lopez, The Eternaut is an Argentina graphic novel that revolves around the main character gaining the power of time travel through his survival of an incoming alien invasion. A subject of various interpretations, The Eternaut is often understood as a massive metaphor that criticizes the dictatorships and the political strifes of its time. This paper will analyze the paradoxical connection between writers and dictators introduced in Diaz’s novel; as well as, compare its connection to the political interpretations made in Oesterheld’s The Eternaut.
This story starts by explaining how Oscar at some point of his life had “luck” when it came to women. When he was seven, his dancing merengue song and the perrito made him “was something of a Casanova…” (Dias 2361). Oscar had two girlfriends, Maritza Chacón and Olga Polanco. Maritza is a beautiful Dominican girl from a good family, and Olga is a Puerto Rican girl from a bad family. Oscar likes them both, but the only difference was