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Recommended: Heroism and literature essay

Where does one end a story that crisscrosses over half a century of Dominican and American history? : in a moment out of time. The last page of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is not so much a conclusion to the novel as a culmination, a point of concrescence at which the whole rollicking, eclectic, multivalent mess of story that Diaz has laid upon us is finally shaped into a coherent artistic whole. In the end, Oscar finally has sex –but this is not his triumph, despite the expectations that have accumulated throughout the novel. The real dying triumph of Oscar, as the decidedly unconventional tragic hero, is his ability to finally experience a moment of genuine love , to break free of both the Dominican mold of masculinity and the insecurities of exclusion and achieve real intimacy with another human being, to really see, for the first and the last time in his life, “the beauty, the beauty.” Oscar is a hero in his willingness to experience this truth.

Oscar’s moment of existential heroism derives its meaning and satisfaction from the historical, or trans-historical, context that the narrative provides. In Oscar, Diaz expands a fractal vision of history, in which the recurrence of certain personal and institutional forces displaces and dissolves the boundaries of time, uniting the many intricate narratives and sub-narratives of the multi-generational immigrant experience in a single panopsis. The fuku, the curse that drifts ominously from generation to generation, and crosses 1500 miles of ocean to incarnate itself again in the lives of Oscar and Lola, is inter-dimensional to the dominator paradigm of gender relations that inflicts such inestimable psychic and bodily damage upon both women and men in ...

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...ominate. Only after he has relinquished the possibility of satisfaction within the conventional framework of gender and sexuality, only after his status as outsider and the thousand tragedies of his meager little life have nearly extinguished his will, can he be released from the physical-historical condition of domination, can he find genuine love, the bond that is not constituted of one party dominating the other, but of a serene intermingling of two bodies and two spirits, an erotic moment that is absolutely perfect and self-justifying within the train of humdrum and insignificant moments that compose existence. The moment he sees for the first time “the beauty, the beauty”, all the anguish, and despair, and wrenching physical pain that Oscar has had to endure, the great looming specter of his death itself, are redeemed. History is redeemed. Life is redeemed.

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