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The Grief And Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

1345 Words6 Pages

Dictators control the information that people are told. In The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz writes about Oscar’s life by using the viewpoints of all of his relatives and his friend. His friend, Yunior, talks about how the family has a curse that started with Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard. The curse is then transferred to Beli, Abelard’s daughter, and finally to Beli’s daughter, Oscar. During the Trujillo regime, the residents of the Dominican Republic have no freedom (Galindez). Many events are censored and everyone is unsafe due to the dictatorship. The novel demonstrates this censorship by referring to blank pages and blank faces. As a dictator, Trujillo hides many things and kills anyone who stands in his way to maintain …show more content…

When Beli gets arrested for having an affair, she is put in a car and “when she looked up she saw that there was one more cop sitting in the car, and when he turned toward her she saw that he didn’t have a face” (141). This is a part of her memory that haunts her as it is the time before any violence committed towards her for her affair. The police are protected with a blank face so that he can attack Beli however he pleases. This cowardly action occurs because the police must dissociate themselves from the violence they commit. Similarly, Oscar is brought to the cane fields for having an affair with Ybon. He is brought there by two police, but while they are attacking him, “Oscar was sure that he was being beaten by three men, not two, that the faceless man from in front of the colmado was joining them” (299). The third person is hidden from everyone there and symbolizes loss of identity as he attacks Oscar. Being a “faceless man,” he has no distinct features and is just another asset that the police use. Since Oscar did not know that there was a third person there, he symbolizes the hidden truths of the regime. Everything in the regime is hidden, so no one knows the truth about what happens. In this way, Trujillo essentially loses his identity as he tries to hide everything. Oscar’s situation is strikingly similar to Beli’s, even though it happens one generation later, which shows how the regime has never

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