Love and Violence
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz covers the issue of Love and Violence thoroughly throughout the book, and shows how anger and love influence the impulsive and reckless decisions the characters made. Searching for Zion, by Emily Raboteau on the other hand shows that love comes in different forms and may be easily misunderstood. Abelard, Belicia, Lola, and Emily show love can be a devastating force if not handled carefully and, could be very dangerous. As others commonly have, Oscar confuses passion or lust with love, which in many ways can be critical when conveyed in violence. Similarly, Emily doesn’t fully understand the love that she shares with her father and it leads her to dangerous encounters.
In the Cabral and de Leon families, violent love is the only love they know. Abelard who was an extremely intelligent man wasn’t smart enough to avoid the tragedy which is love and violence. Beginning with Abelard and ending with Oscar the only love the family could relate to was one that included violence. In Abelard’s case, he was protecting his daughters out of the love he had for them. Trujillo was fixed on having his way with Abelard’s eldest daughter, Jacquelyn. But Abelard went through great lengths to avoid Trujillo and the curse with him as well. This is where the curse first crosses paths with the Cabral and de Leon families. The curse takes the lives of everyone in the Cabral family except for young Belicia. Abelard’s love for his daughter leads him and his family to tragic and violent deaths which can only be credited to the fact that the fuku curse goes wherever love is.
In Oscar’s voyage in search of passionate love, he continually falls under the deadly, friend zone or as it’s u...
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...d kill immediately but if acted upon quickly the violence could be avoided. Abelard started this whole mess but the love of his family was too strong and, he would rather his family broken up than together and possibly miserable. Lola’s problems with mother-daughter love roots from Abelard breaking up the family and Belicia problems with La Inca as a child. Finally Emily, she never felt the love she actually had because she was very conscious about what was going on around her, she would just form an opinion and stick with it stubbornly. Love comes in all different ways and was the clear cut reason why anger and love influence the impulsive and reckless decisions the characters made in their lives.
Works Cited
Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.
Raboteau, Emily. Searching for Zion. New York: Grove Press , 2013.Print
...ecome stronger when he finds out that his daughter, Justina, is no longer around. While he is drunk he mistakenly kills his bird, Rita, because it reminded him of the guilt build in. “Though tragic, this death too lends itself to rebirth.” With guilt off his shoulders he is finally to get on with the rest of his life. Regret have taken both of Esperanze and Rafael’s life. For Esperanze, she feels guilty for being raped and never telling anyone. For Rafael, he feels guilty for not being able to live his life because his mother is all he cares about. When the two come together, they are unable to forgive themselves and start their new lives together. For all of these characters, they all had to get over guilt or regret that has helped shaped the person they were. But being able to forgive one other is the only way for them to shape their life into something better.
In the second story of Drown by Junot Diaz, Yunior and Rafa have already been in the United States of America for about three years. In this story, their mother’s sister came to the United States. They travel to the Bronx in order to celebrate their aunts and uncles’ arrival. In Fiesta 1980, we meet their father and sister, and learn more about their mother. Through the way they all interact, we learn more about each family member’s characteristics and their family dynamic.
Trauma is a disturbing experience that causes deep stress and possible anxiety. Traumatic incidents are thought to involve victimization. Examples of traumatic events range from witness, physical attack, emotional or sexual child abuse, to the sudden death or disabling illness of a loved one. Traumatic events in particular, possibly leads to a multitude of symptoms, including depression, guilt and obsessive thought about the victimization experience. Trauma and the body can be perceived in a literary context in Junot Diaz’s, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jean Rhys’s, Wide Sargasso Sea and Danticat’s, The Farming of Bones.
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 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
This wouldn’t be the first time that Oscar was head over heels for a girl [Ana] but Ybón was different. “In the middle of the street he told her how it was. He told her that he was in love with her and that he’d been hurt but now he was all right and if he could just have a week alone with her, one short week, then everything would be fine in him and he would be able to face what he had to face and she said I don’t understand and so he said it again, that he loved her more than the Universe and it wasn’t something that he could shake so please come away with me for a little while, lend me your strength and then it be over if she wanted.” (Diaz 316). This quote makes Oscar seem very obsessive and desperate for Ybón. His state of mind seems to be irrational as he rambles on and on. His tone has changed from what we are normally used to. Misfortune comes his way when Oscar doesn’t leave Ybón alone. Oscar gets beaten up by some of Trujillo’s minions sent by Ybón’s policeman boyfriend. It doesn’t end here as even after Oscar is back in New Jersey, he runs back to the Dominican Republic to tell Ybón how much he loves her. Unsurprisingly, she turns down his love and threatens Oscar with her omnipotent boyfriend. Oscar, of course, does not stop which leads to “the beating to end all beatings” (Diaz
On analyzing a symbol as a literary convention used by author, Junot Díaz makes a way to identify the purpose of the device. In his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the mechanism is used to develop a specific character and point of view. The symbol is a sensory image that holds rich implication that holds either a narrow or broad connotation. However, on occasion the reader is cast off by the author with an unknown meaning of the symbol and is forced to create his own interpretation. The latter principle is intentionally carried out by the author as a literary hook to draw the attention of his audience to keep reading. Moreover, in combination with the symbol is the calculated method by the author of his utilization of pathos as a way of arousing the emotions of his readership. Consequently, the author effectively brings into existence an impetus by which the reader will be controlled. The use of a symbol as a literary convention in a novel creates a hidden significance. A literary convention, a symbol of faceless men, is used by Dominican-American writer, Junot Díaz to give significance and shape to his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The idea of love is very complex and can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Both “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and “Araby” by James Joyce portray the lives of two individuals who are in love. “The Things They Carried” is about a young lieutenant named Jimmy Cross during the Vietnam War. Lieutenant Cross was incapable of focusing on the war because of his constant thoughts of the girl he loved, Martha. “Araby” is about a boy who is infatuated with a girl he has never had a conversation with. Although both protagonists in “The Things They Carried” and “Araby” eventually realize that the girls they loved didn’t feel the same way about them, Lieutenant Cross tried to move on by destroying everything he had that reminded him of Martha, while the boy in “Araby” was left disappointed.
Dangerous love was an attraction for March in Alice Hoffman's Here on Earth. The story suggests that her love is pure from the beginning and that she could only love her counter part Hollis. The twist and turns that this novel brings shows the doom that falls upon March and Hollis's relationship. The affection grows to lust and then to a need for their bodies. March and Hollis's need for the love of each other lead to each of their destructions.
Cassandra Clare, author of the best-selling novel City of Bones, once wrote, “To love is to destroy, and to be loved is to be the one destroyed”. As an author of a series of young adult books, Clare wishes to send a message to adolescent readers regarding the destruction that young, passionate love can lead to. A similar theme is explored in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where two adolescents from feuding families fall in love with one another. When they first see each other on the night of the Capulet party, they quickly fall in love and are soon married by Romeo’s friend and mentor, Friar Lawrence. Their love, being full of passion in its quick course, faces many trials such as Romeo’s banishment from their hometown of Verona, as well as Juliet being forced to marry Paris, kinsman of the Prince. The affection they feel for one another, being all consuming, often leads them to want to sacrifice everything for each other, including their own lives. Their self-destructive, rushed love ends with their deaths, occurring just a multiple days after they first met. In William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, many characters such as Friar Lawrence, Romeo, and Juliet illustrate that young, passionate love is a powerful force that leads to destruction.
His unending love being blocked by her inaccessibility shreds the last bit of his retained faith and leads him to his demise. Through Oscar’s rose-tinted glasses, he fails to see Ybón as anything other than his one true love, and the beginning of his ‘real life.’ Following her around town, leaving letters and voicemails detailing his deep affections that while she claims to reciprocate, she cannot because of her boyfriend, the police captain. Ignoring her pleas and warnings for him to let her go for his own safety, Oscar “meeting Ybón physically marks Oscar, in part because of the beatings he receives for courting her, but also because he decides to diet and lost ‘all the weight’(Díaz 312)” (Sáez). Not Lola, not Yunior, not even Oscar himself could get him to shape up and put himself together. After meeting Ybón, Oscar immediately starts putting in the work to look good for her, showing just how much he believed that she truly was his last chance at happiness. This continued until the police tracked Oscar down and kill him. Beyond a simple shooting, Oscar’s death showcases that he truly believed that Ybón was his last true chance for love, as if he believed he had another chance with someone else, he would have fought (in signature Wao style) to love another day. Yet, even in the words of Dr Manhattan, “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends” (Díaz 331). Oscar’s death went beyond himself: pushing Lola to pull herself together and get
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
In his book, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, author John Rollin Ridge introduces readers to a fictional character, who is a larger-than-life bandit. According to the story, Murieta set out on a path of revenge and organized a large band of outlaws to terrorize Californians. Murieta and his men committed terrible and bloody crimes (including robbery and murder). This pattern of criminal behavior continued until the band was pursued by mountain rangers, ending the story in a dramatic climax for the protagonist. However, this story is not an accurate depiction of the important elements of the “New” West according to author Patricia Nelson Limerick, in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Instead, the character Murieta exemplifies many of the myths of the American West and the idea of innocence.
...easurable and choices you never thought that you would make are made. Romeo and Juliet decided that they would marry- until death do them part- they loved one another so much that even then they did not part. They committed suicide to be together- together in a place, hopefully, where they could be free from prejudice and hate. Tony and Maria never got the chance to run away and live together in this place, either. While both stories chronicle how hatred, prejudice, forbidden love and stereotypes change a person, neither mention what really made their lives impossible- revenge. A revenge that ran so deep, it ended lives. This was a revenge that didn’t solve any problems, but simply led to more, bigger problems. So, maybe while love can do miraculous things, like help you forget how to hate your enemies, even it is not fully capable of eliminating revenge.
...essive love for Veda; her need to gain acceptance and approval from this undeserving daughter that leads her catastrophic collapse. For Veda, it is her spiteful and vindictive nature to exact pain from those she holds in contempt. One needs the other in order to bear witness to the conclusion of their story. Love and hate rules in Glendale.