How The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao Summary

Dictators throughout history have tried to silence those who fought to expose the truth about their regimes through fear, intimidation, and or censorship. From past dictatorships such as The Nazi’s book burnings, to today’s President, Donald Trump calling those he does not agree with as “Fake News”. The brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, tells the heart-rending tale of a ghetto overweight Dominican nerd growing up in New Jersey, who as the story tells us is a contradictory to what every “Male Dominican” is supposed to be. Who would rather write a new thrilling story about some girl he made eye contact rather than actually approaching her. Oscar’s lonely life blends tales of the horrific life under Rafael Trujillo, a dictator who has been quietly

Through the De Leon family along with various characters who themselves are writers tried to unearth the otherwise the dark past of the Dominican Republic. Distinctively each of the writers within the story tried to show the dark history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, or as Yunior mockingly mentions in the very first footnote of the story: “For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican History; Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 with impeccable ruthless brutality.”(Diaz 2). While Oscar’s stories are filled with misery, the narrator seems to put a peculiar interest on how Oscar trying to fall in love completely takes over his life as well as his writing, just as how a

Yunior states: “An entire family fed piece by piece to the sharks because a son had dared compare Trujillo to Adolf Hitler before a terrified audience of his peers, a suspicious assassination in Bonao of a well-known Unionist”(Diaz 227). This tactic of terrorizing those who spoke ill of the regime, while not directly being for writers, Trujillo’s acts of violence could be felt by those who would want to write about the regimes true intentions. As the most notorious dictator, Adolf Hitler wrote in his book Mein Kampf: “Therefore, let the writer remain by his ink-well, engaging in 'theoretical” activity, if his intelligence and ability are equal to it; for leadership he is neither born nor chosen.”(Hitler 107). If in fact the writer is smart enough to realize and has the ability to be a leader he, could very well start to move people towards a change in power. Writing is recognized by dictators as one of, if not the deadliest, dangers to their regime; which has the ability to move people or in the words of Hitler: “The brand masses of people can be moved only by the power of speech.”(Hitler 107) that inevitably leads to the downfall of the