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How The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao Theme Of Identity

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The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz explores Latin culture in depth from various perspectives. This novel discusses deep concepts surrounding Dominican culture such as love, sex, fuku, gender, and power that shape the characters throughout the novel. These themes alter the way the culture functions and influences the youth into following these stereotypes. Gender, masculinity, and power are very prominent in the novel and often define the character for who he/she is. While the protagonist in this novel is Oscar de Leon, this story is mainly about how this culture and Oscar’s story has formed the narrator, Yunior, into becoming who he is at the end of the novel. Dominican culture and Oscar’s friendship ultimately shaped …show more content…

Oscar’s development and role helped make Yunior into someone that is a man, opposed to someone striving for Machismo. Machismo can be defined in Dominican culture as being a jock, witty, and a “ladies man”; however, masculinity and femininity are reliant on one another in this culture. Men are expected to be able to woo any lady they want whether through a suave personality or even violence. This culture is reliant on the man being completely dominant over the woman, often protecting her and providing for her, while also having many women at one time. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo is introduced as the feared dictator who is a predator with pretty women and is known for his extreme violence. He often would have his men take any good-looking women in order to satisfy his sexual needs. Trujillo is the ideal incarnation of machismo, or being a man in Dominican culture, “…fucking every hot girl in site… thousands of women” (Díaz, 2007, p. 2). This idea of having many women, as Yunior often emphasizes he has, is encouraged through this dictatorship while Oscar has different ideas of being a man. This adds to the bildungsroman structure, or a coming of age novel, that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao seems to follow. The bildungsroman is centered on Yunior’s story rather than Oscar’s. Through influence from the basic Dominican culture and Oscar’s values, Yunior’s masculinity is

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It was through her mother’s discipline where she learned to go under the guise of a perfect Dominican daughter, one who would be “the one cooking, cleaning doing the wash, buying groceries, writing letters to the bank to explain why a house payment was going to be late, translating” (Díaz 56). With all the attention that Belicia Cabral was giving to Lola, she never had the time to attend to Oscar and see what he was up to. Another way Lola de León was different was that she is extremely rebellious. As she grew older, she became tired of putting up a façade that she was the perfect child and

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Not only does Diaz write novels and short stories, but he also takes action towards exposing the problems that Dominican people especially women face everyday. There might be some people who consider Diaz to be an Antifeminist and also a disgrace to his country, the Dominican Republic, but the only thing that Diaz is doing with his writing is exposing the reality of what its meant to be an immigrate from another country and how machismo affects Feminism in Latin cultures. Diaz shows his feminism by exposing machismo and what women in Latin cultures deal with everyday. Machismo is a term used to describe the dominant male behavior in Latin cultures. Machismo can also be describe as a man objectifying a women as a

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It provides a role in character development shown predominantly in Patrias character. It shows the extent of Trujillo’s actions against the Dominican people by showing Patrias desperateness for her son. These examples depicted in the book show how the theme of religion has an impact on In the Time of the

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In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz examines the struggles of the proverbial nerd in the basement in his continuous struggle for love. For Oscar, this is a losing battle. The combination of his obesity, his love for science fiction and fantasy that he is extremely overweight and is in love with everything science fiction and fantasy. The problem: Oscar is unable to, or chooses not to, hide his nerdiness.

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When applying Marxist Criticism to the novel, readers can see that one way Trujillo is able to maintain his power is by convincing women to live in his homes. Trujillo owns many homes and has a woman live in each one. He uses his power to manipulate women to live secluded from their friends and family. The only thing that Trujillo gets out of doing this is having a fling, but he is able to show

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Yunior is impacted by the patriarchal society because of the relationship he has with his father. Yunior struggles to be in a relationship because his father does not give him parental support. Yunior’s perspective in a relationship is different in Dominican Republic and in the United States. Yunior and his father have a distance relationship such as communication and guidance. Yunior does not receive parental advice from his parents about his relationships.

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In Latino culture, machismo behavior is defined by men that see inferiority in people and expect obedience from them (mostly non-male-bodied individuals). This is illustrated when Blanca invites the pastor and Claudia, a woman from church, to dinner despite Julio’s distaste for it. As a result, Julio snaps at Blanca after her persistent preaching of a church where she is indirectly disrespected and “‘the women are treated as if they were just there to glorify their husbands, their children, and their pastor’” (Quiñonez, 130). Throughout the novel, Blanca is presented as a pious girl, as if she has not changed from the young schoolgirl that Julio fell in love with when he was young.

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The novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, written by Junot Diaz, introduces a Dominican family. One of the members of this family and main characters of the story is Oscar Wao. Although the story introduces Oscar as a “lady’s man”— having not one, but two girlfriends—Oscar eventually gravitates towards the polar end on the masculinity spectrum of machismo; as he matures he becomes a fat, awkward, and nerdy adolescent with few friends and is of little to no interest to girls. Whilst the fact that girls do not have in interest in Oscar, Oscar has a very big interest in girls; he longs to feel loved and craves intimacy. Aside from his love for girls, the unreal worlds of sci-Fi and fantasy are another intimate love of Oscar Wao’s.

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The short story tells the reader how to “date” based on the girl’s social class or ethnicity. The point of dating is said to be able to get to know the person and care and appreciate them making the story opposite of what the reader is trying to achieve. There’s also irony at the end of the story, “She'll say, I like Spanish guys, and even though you've never been to Spain, say, I like you. You'll sound smooth” (Diaz 121). Yunior is probably the opposite of smooth but yet gives advice on how to make a girl engage in a sexual act.

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The stories of Junot Diaz feature various elements of social and personal issues that are highly prevalent in young Latinx men, primarily the compulsion and adverse effect of machismo, the poignancy of being an outcast in one’s community, and the lack of a father figure in a boy’s life. The first set of short stories prominently feature Ysrael, a Dominican boy whose face was disfigured by a pig when he was an infant. In “Ysrael”, he is the object of Yunior’s fascination, and the victim or Rafa’s (Yunior’s brother) torment.

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Trujillo had no respect for women, to him, and many other male characters in the novel, women were sex symbols. This type of behavior shows in how the narrator views women also in Oscar and his one sided relationships, INSERT QOUTE about YUNIER AND EXPLAINATION It is arguable that cultural lens is more relative in the book than that of the feminist lens. This perspective makes sense because in the book the dominican culture is very significant. The story of Oscar, the character whom the novel is about, is told through the voice of Yunior, the narrator.

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The Dominican Masculinity In the novel a typical Dominican male is portrayed as powerful, full of charm and physically attractive. Oscar, weighing over 300 pounds, and living an extremely nerdy life is a complete opposite of the Dominican stereotype. According to the book’s narration the most important part of DR masculinity is sex and this is again something that Oscar struggles to experience, but no matter what he does, he can’t. On the other hand, Junior is the exact representation of a Dominican male. He possesses all the properties that a DR man is supposed to have and even these are extraordinary potent.

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Through Antonio and Ultima, readers identify the creation of a culture that has been forge by war, discrimination, and common hardships. With Ultima being a powerful curandera, the story shows the importance of the female character within Mexican culture. Today, this is prevalent in many Mexican-American households, as the elderly women are held in the highest respect. Another aspect of Mexican-American Culture is masculinity, which is shown in Bless Me, Ultima when Antonio’s father says, “a man of the llano does not run from a fight” (Anaya, 1999, p.37). There are countless examples of Mexican-American masculinity in this novel, like when it mentions that Gabriel’s two eldest sons are fighting in WWII.

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Márquez ridicules traditional gender norms and the sociocultural pressures against men and women through repeatedly criticizing gender expectations held by both men and women in the novel. Márquez juxtaposes the role of men with that of women in Colombian society, writing that “brothers were brought up to be men” and “the girls had been reared to get married” (p.30). Contemporary readers may expect the sentence to read ‘the girls had been brought up to be women’ but Márquez wryly mocks Colombian values by challenging the perceptions of gender held by readers. Juxtaposition is utilised by the author to highlight the power imbalance between men and women in Colombian society, effectively satirizing gender roles. Additionally, Márquez shapes meaning in the sentence with diction through the utilisation of the word ‘brought up’ for men, and ‘reared’ for women, a word which is typically reserved for raising animals.

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