Summary: The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

In his historical novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz illuminates the dysfunctionality of the Dominican Republic under the oppressive regime of Rafael Trujillo. As a generational curse that follows the Cabral family throughout the diaspora of the Dominican Republic and the United States, the fukú serves as the foundation of the narrator’s (Yunior) depiction of Trujillo’s egregious legacy. This legacy, which was characterized by misogyny, censorship, and violence, accurately reflects Trujillo’s embodiment of an aggressive masculinity and causes Yunior to associate the typical Dominican male with terror, abuse, and the objectification of women. Furthermore, Trujillo’s dominance as a hostile dictator naturalizes the Dominican’s

Despite this conventional understanding, Diaz asserts that, though not entirely independent from the embodiment of masculinity, the dominance of Trujillo’s legacy was derived from his ability to silence and suppress the voices of his people. Although the content of Yunior’s narrative depict his misogyny and likeness to Trujillo, its form enables him to undermine Trujillo’s oppressive policy of silencing his people. In this, Yunior’s manipulation of hearsay, footnotes, and literary allusions enable him to acquire the transgressive role in deconstructing authority while also facilitating his own problematic assumption of power as a narrator. Altogether, Yunior’s authority as a narrator asserts the inevitability of a bias in storytelling and, as a form of suppression in itself, facilitates the construction of fabricated

Illuminating aspects of history that were lost during Trujillo’s dictatorship, Yunior states, “at first glance, [Trujillo] was just your prototypical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined” (2). Yunior’s reference to Trujillo’s power as “terminal,” a term that is synonymous to “lethal” or “deadly,” epitomizes the dictator’s authority to silence others, including historians, thus annihilating the historical record of his crimes. In response to Trujillo’s fatal dominion, Yunior creates and introduces the supernatural power of the fukú that, depicting the detriments of Trujillo’s regime, plagued the lives of the people in the Dominican