The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao By Junot Diaz

Society holds a fantasized view of what an ideal male should look like. We are shown advertisements that portray masculinity as having chiseled abs and being surrounded by provocatively posed women. Action movies idolize the men that are able to seduce any women that they desire. These often unobtainable standards are stressed as the basic necessities for living a decently content life. In his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz explores the destructive consequences that these standards can have on the personal identity of an individual. Society instructs people that they should strive to fit into the mold of what an ideal person looks like. As a result, those who do not attempt to match this image are ostracized and looked

He has a deep love for comic books, tabletop roleplaying games, and reading fantasy and science fiction novels. He is everything that one would imagine if one was asked to picture the stereotypical image of a “nerd”. Oscar, however, is also a Dominican. As a Dominican male, he is expected to have an image of sexual hyper-masculinity. He should have a muscular body and be able to seduce as many girlfriends as he desires. Instead, Oscar “couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it. Couldn’t play sports for shit, or dominoes, was beyond uncoordinated...And most damning of all [he had] no looks” (19-20). He is the exact opposite of everything that he is supposed to be. As a result, Oscar is cast out of the society that he lives in. He longs to establish meaningful relationship with others, especially girls, but he is unable to because he is so different from all of the people around

Despite this, Oscar still tries to maintain a sense of his personal identity. His central passion is writing, and he spends much of his free time working on science fiction novels written in the style of the authors that he loved. When his friends began to leave him for their girlfriends and “hurt him and drag his trust through the mud (), Oscar continued to write. He knew that staying inside and imagining alien adventures wasn’t what society expected him to do, but it was what he loved and that it defined who he was. He used his writing and passion for comic books and science fiction as his way to form relationships. He shared his novels with anyone who would listen to him, and tried to have conversations with people about the games and movies that he enjoyed. As a result, when he did find people who shared his interests, their relationships were built on a mutual interest in each other’s personal identity. In college, he found a girl who enjoyed going to the same movies and playing the same games as him. She “read him all her poetry” and when Yunior comes into their room and finds her sitting on his bed, he is amazed that they are just talking about a favorite author. Oscar is told by society that he should be focusing on just having sex, but instead he is able to build a strong connection just based on his own identity. At the