The short novel called, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is about a young Dominican man that experiences the cold reality of how unfair life can be. Junot Díaz, the author, explore the need for love and what people would do for it. According to Gradesaver.com, He was also a Dominican man, how loved writing works inspired by Stephen King when he was younger. It would seem like he used Oscar Wao to illustrate what it was like to both be a more of a creative type and the culture that surrounds him. Oscar Wao was used to react to the violent and sex- the world around him from a regular guy’s view. Dominican men were conditioned from a young age that love from a woman is the most valuable possession a man can own. These women were in return …show more content…
Throughout this book, The Gangster and Beli’s relationship is just one of the many examples of the power struggle between men and women using violence to get what they want. To gain the attention of a female, males are taught to be aggressive and vice-versa, female are taught to accept this treatment as if it was normal. This is proclaimed as so, “He was seven then. In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it Because in those days he was (still) a “normal” Dominican boy raised in a “typical” Dominican family, his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties…” (Diaz,Junot). In the first page of this novel as Oscar was taught at a young age to flirt with girls. It was normal and even encouraged these gender roles at a very young age to further progress when they age. Love is taught to be something to fight for, not only in a romantic scene, however in a physically dominating
Her foundation of love for The Gangster started in a peculiar manner. It started with Beli throwing her drink at a guy who grabbed her arm at the nightclub after he offered to buy her a drink. Oddly enough, she returned a few nights later and asked to dance with him. It’s apparent that The Gangster is not a good man, “Skilled our Gangster became in many a perfidy, but where our man truly excelled, where he smashed records and grabbed gold, was in the flesh trade. Then, like now, Santo Domingo was to popóla [slang for female genitalia] what Switzerland was to chocolate. And there was something about the binding, selling, and degradation of women that brought out the best in The Gangster; he had an instinct for it, a talent – call him the Caracaracol of Culo [Trickster of Ass]” (Diaz 121) yet Beli still falls for him. Their relationship is complicated to say the least and starts having adverse ramifications on Beli’s life. La Inca isn’t very happy with everything that Beli is doing and sees her lifestyle as disrespectful to her Beli’s parents. After The Gangster gets her pregnant, she is ecstatic, thinking that she can get married to the goon. The Gangster does not reciprocate this same attraction but he continues to play her. Her obsession over The Gangster leads to Beli getting kidnapped and nearly having her baby forcefully aborted. She is
If you’re not careful or if you do something bad the Fukú curse will get you. That is one of the major themes in Junot Diaz is novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. The book title suggests that this is a story about man named Oscar Wao, but really the book is about three generations of Oscar’s family, and struggles’ and heartbreak each generation suffers at the hands of the Fukú curse. Oscar’s family originates from the Caribbean nation of Dominican Republic. In the book, Diaz weaves his fictional story with real life people and historic events. A major real person mention though out the book is the former president of Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. In the story Diaz, describes how each generations of Oscar’s family have been
In Oscar’s voyage in search of passionate love, he continually falls under the deadly, friend zone or as it’s used in the book, “Let’s-Be-Friend Vortexes”, which in fact led him to acting violently toward others, and himself (41). While “dating” his first love, Ana, Oscar encounters love’s violence for the first time.... ... middle of paper ... ... Belicia showed us that the violence in love could kill immediately, but if acted upon quickly, the violence could be avoided.
By examining the narrative voice as well as the cultural restraints placed on them, readers can see the sexist culture in the novel and that the novel itself does not necessarily advocate this misogyny. Yunior, a Dominican man, is the overall narrator of the novel, so readers essentially see everything through his masculine eye. When discussing a brief fling with Lola, Oscar’s sister, Yunior says, “Even those nights after I got jumped she wouldn’t let me steal on her ass for nothing. So you can sleep in my bed but you can’t sleep with me?” (Diaz 169) His question suggests that it is his right to sleep with her, and his discussion of Lola herself objectifies her by noting only her body and her refusal to use it. This objectification is clearly sexist, but it is a reflection of the narrative voice, Yunior, not of Lola. Yunior will casually refer to a woman as “a bitch” (Diaz 183), which is clearly demeaning, but it is a man’s view and does not reflect on the substance of the women. It shows readers the culture he was raised in, not an actual portrayal of the women, illustrating a misogynist society but not a misogynistic novel. In the Dominican Republic, gender-based violence is the fourth leading cause of death, hinting at the overall problems caused by the hyper-sexualized nature of the country. Sociologist Denise Paiewonsky
From the beginning, men in the Dominican Republic shared stories of terrible male dictators, including the Trujillo, and the abuse they placed on women. Men began to heap on women and throughout history, have continued to treat women unfairly. In response, women in the Dominican Republic are targeted by male’s dominance because of the continuing history. Lola, Isis's mother, grew up with a rough upbringing. Lola narrates her past in a way that shows how abusive and aggressive her mother Beli is because she had no father.
Love is a powerful force of nature. It is a feeling of passionate and deep affection. It is patient, kind, and honest. It has the ability to consume someone’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It serves as the foundation for numerous songs, poems, shows, and novels. However, the attributes of love in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are depicted as a curse preying on the insecurities of relationships and a blessing embodying its beauty. Fukú, a curse, strikes the Dominican Republic and its inhabitants through violent acts of revenge, rage, and jealousy. The source of fukú’s power, nonetheless, is derived from the infamous dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo. The dictator not only presided over all political, economic, and social
From the seemingly shallow, stereotypical woes of virginal Oscar Wao caught in an explicit and brutally violent society, to the harrowing journey of Yakov Bok that pushes him into a misplaced slot of fixing the falling state of Tsarist Russia, to Equality 7-2521: tall, beautiful, and the opposite of conformity and equality; one would say that they all seem to differentiate substantially not in only in journey, but in personality. However, all have one thing in common… they all encompass traits of the archetypal Emersonian genius; they individually and collectively, fulfill the following Emersonian thought, in one way or another,”To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that
Even though Luis’s gang try to change his way of treating women, Luis is a strong character and does not change his beliefs. “Some gangs initiate females by having them have sex with all the ranking members of the gang” (Report Gang Crime Tips). Just like the gangs on the streets, Luis’s gang also believes women are only meant to have sex. His gang keeps reminding him, that women are weak and men have more power than them. However, Luis knows women should not be treated that way and simply ignores them.
“O it’s against the laws of nature for a Dominicano to die without fucking at least once,” (174) said Yunior, during a night in his college dorm room with Oscar Woa. These two characters are from a book titled “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Woa” a story about Oscar trying to find real love for the first and the journey his friends and his family go through during this time. In this book there is a reappearing theme that continues to show itself, that theme is Dominican masculinity. Dominican masculinity is described as a manly man who can pull women and that also has this certain type of mojo that defines their personality. The only things is that this certain masculinity rather than representing a healthy self-esteem and sense of power, Dominican masculinity represents a cocky kind of self-destructive personality that seems to emotionally stunt the men characters. Most of the male characters seem to have this certain masculinity, except our protagonist Oscar.
Yunior is our narrator, but makes it clear to us that he is not a nerd like Oscar. He likes the ladies and is actually very suave with them. He is a good influence on Oscar when it comes to turning him into a Dominican playboy, but if we look deeply, Oscar was actually more of an influence on Yunior than he realizes. While Yunior is trying to turn Oscar into a man, the tables turn and Oscar teaches Yunior how to be a real man and learn how to respect women. Oscar was not violent with women even though he chased after them, which was actually quite admirable for Yunior. Yunior is the perfect example of the machismo that Diaz is trying to portray in his Dominican stereotyping. According to a study done in Stanford, we learn that males who consider themselves to be macho have an: “expansive and almost uncontrollable” sexual appetite. Being that this sexual appetite is so uncontrollable, macho men try and feed this appetite in any way possible. They focus on sexual dominance because for them it is all about their pride, like we see in Yunior. It is a competition between men to demonstrate their machoism focusing on who can conquer more women. In a machoistic man’s mind there are only two roles for women which include “la casa y la calle”, or the house and the street which is a very antifeminist idea in which Diaz portrays in his book. Men want to dominate and women want to be protected, but the ironic thing is that many times women need to be protected from their own partners due to domestic abuse—either verbal, mental, or physical. Diaz showed the violence and rage that men have inside them, and also the vulnerability and lack of confidence some of the women have being that they went without defending themselves. While the book never mentioned Yunior raising his hand on a girl, he was not the most respectful towards women including Lola, which may be why Lola is “the one that got
Junot Diaz’s story “How to Date a Brown girl, Black girl, White girl, or Halfie” is a written instructional guide offering advice on proper dating etiquette. The story is centered around an Afro-Dominican teenage boy who breaks down instructions on how to get laid with women based on their ethnicity and social class. He explains step by step how you should handle each woman, from changing your speech and behavioral approach depending on whether she was an insider or an outsider. However the narrator’s unreliability leaves the readers with questions on how true the story is or how it should be interpreted. The unreliability of the narrator in this story reveals a lack of pride in the narrator’s individuality, thus the facade he keeps up in order to hide his ethnicity and social class.
Junot Diaz is a Dominican-American writer whose collection of short stories Drown tells the story of immigrant families in the urban community of New Jersey. His short story “Fiesta, 1980” focuses on Yunior, an adolescent boy from Dominican Republic and his relationship with his father. On the other hand, Piri Thomas was a great Latino writer from Puerto-Rico whose memoir Down These Mean Streets tells his life story as an adolescent residing in Harlem and the challenges he faces outside in the neighborhood and at home with his father. Both Diaz and Thomas in different ways explore the dynamics of father-son relationships in their work. Furthermore, both expose masculinity as a social construct.
The short story “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, and Halfie” by Junot Diaz is the main character, Yunior’s, guide to dating girls of different races and the ways to act in order to get what you want from them. The only thing Yunior seems to want for these girls is sexual acts. This short story argues that a person’s heritage, economic class, and race affect how a person identifies themselves, and how their identity affects how they act towards other people. The pressures a person may feel from society also has an effect on how a person treats themselves and others. The pressure and expectations from society are also what makes Yunior think he needs to have sex with these girls. There are many different occasions of the main character talking and acting differently to other people within the story, such as: to himself, his friends, and the different girls he tries to date.
In Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, he is telling the story of a Dominican family but mainly about the son, Oscar de Leon. The book opens with the story of Oscar as a child and him having two girlfriends at the same time. The older people in town see him as a ladies man and encourage him. The boy and the two girls all break up and his life seemed to be on a steady decline since then. He grows up to become a nerdy, fat, and awkward adolescence with few friends and even less interest from girls. This phase persists throughout his life and he never develops out of the nerdy boy he was as a child. The Dominican Republic was a hostile and poor place during the time of the novel. The dictator Trujillo controls the lives of the people in the country. This influenced the de Leon family’s present and future. Diaz develops the story by using the superstition, the cane field, and male dominance of the Dominican men
At the point when Beli comes attractive in her young age and the young men begin to notice her, she gets talked about like "y ese tetatorio" and "que pechonalidad" (93). Now these are not your formal Spanish words, but rather some of the standard words like “pecho” means mid-section and “teta” meaning areola or bosom can be interpreted in different ways of talking about a woman’s parts. It does not make a difference that the reader really will not understand these words but will get the idea of what they talk about with the context clues around the word. Diaz uses the slang to try to have the reader connect them to the characters and give them life. The fact that Diaz did not try to have a definition for each slang or Spanish word is to help the reader experience something that they might of never experienced before and actually make them research the words and explore.