Theme Of Identity In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

“Negocios”, a story from Junot Díaz’s drown, provides an indepth look into the life of an immigrant from the Dominican Republic trying to make a life for him and his family in the United States. Ramon is constantly faced with difficult challenges but he shows an amazing amount of determination to achieve his goal of providing his family with a better life.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is not a happy book. The Author, Junot Diaz, does a great job fooling the reader into believing the story is about the De Leon family, specifically Oscar who is an over weight nerd trying to find the love of his life, but due to a family “fuku” or curse Oscar is having a lot of trouble doing so. Instead, the story actually portrays the dark history of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Upon reading the stories of Oscar’s relatives the reader feels a powerful message of fear and oppression due to the actions of the Trujillo regime. Even after the demise of

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated with his family to New Jersey, where a collection of his short stories are based from. Out of that collection is a short story “Fiesta, 1980”, which was featured in The Best American Short Stories, 1997. This story is told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, who lives in the Bronx of northern New Jersey with his family. He is having trouble understanding why things are the way they are in his family. Diaz shows Yunior’s character through his cultures, his interaction with his family, and his bitterness toward his father.

The novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez, illustrates these challenges. Throughout the novel, we see how different aspects of culture shock impact the Garcia family. In this essay I will discuss how particular events change each family member’s Dominican cultural values and identity.

Cristina Henriquez’, The Book of Unknown Americans, folows the story of a family of immigants adjusting to their new life in the United States of America. The Rivera family finds themselves living within a comunity of other immigrants from all over South America also hoping to find a better life in a new country. This book explores the hardships and injustices each character faces while in their home country as well as withina foreign one, the United States. Themes of community, identity, globalization, and migration are prevalent throughout the book, but one that stood out most was belonging. In each chacters viewpoint, Henriquez explores their feelings of the yearning they have to belong in a community so different than the one that they are used to.

He acts differently towards his friends and other boys his age in the neighborhood. For example, when his friend refers to the girl Yunior is trying to date as ‘”that bitch”’ Yunior only agrees with him (Diaz 236). He doesn’t defend them at all, which is an indication that he doesn’t care for these girls at all, only what they’ll do for him. He also says that he will call his friends and let them know ‘”He did it”’ if he does hook up with one of these girls, with no respect for them. This is indicating that he is trying to hook up with these girls because he feels like his friends expect him too. Yunior does this because he sees other boys doing these things, and he wants to be like them. He wants to be the same and be accepted, and that’s why he treats these different people in different ways.

Diaz strategically uses Yunior to narrate a majority of the novel. Though Yunior’s identity as the narrrater was not revealed till almost the very end of the novel, Yunior gave a very descriptive and satirical version of the life of Oscar Wao. Yunior was Oscar’s roommate at Rutgers, the boyfriend of Oscar’s sister, Lola, and the reader

In defining one’s identity, many different factors are considered; such as one’s nationality, characteristic, personality, ability, experience, religion, and etc. Especially for those people who live in America, so called country of immigration, has much more complicated identities than those Asian country people where mixed people are rarely noticed. Thinking about the concept of identity, some people easily categorized themselves as simple factors and terms which could describe their surface; white, black, Asian, European, pretty, ugly, nice, mean and so on and so forth. And that is the most point where majority people stopped to list their identities from exploring more in complicated range. However, there are many people who dig more than common people; one great example would be Denise Chavez, who is the author of the novel called Loving Pedro Infante, who kept asking herself about her identity to approach more accurate and clear ideas. In her work, reader could see the confusion of Tere, the main character of the novel, went through her life as Latin-American female in dealing with finding one’s true identity and how she accept her as who she really is. Denise Chavez, who is obviously Latin-American lady, mirror her own life experience through the character she created and introduce to readers about tough life she lived in America as Mejicana. The main character of this novel have a clear understanding and strong idea about herself throughout the novel, even if

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is about a Dominican family who lives in Paterson New Jersey and they have been through many tribulations in life. The theme I chose for my essay is Fuku and Love, in the novel these two themes were mainly the reason why the characters got their self in situations they could not overcome. The novel is overall about finding love and overcoming the family curse.

Oscar is the antithesis of his culture’s idea of manliness. In the beginning we meet an Oscar who is called “Porfirio Rubirosa” (21). Everyone is proud of the boy because this is exactly what he needs to be to be a Dominican man. Men from Dominican Republic, and perhaps Spanish Caribbean men, are expected to take care of their family especially their mothers and sisters, yet they are also expected to be “playboys” who have multiple women. as the first line of the story communicates, “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly-bachetero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock” (21). Oscar is the type of man who women say they want; kind, sensitive, considerate, smart, and romantic. He truly want to find true

As children grow up in a dysfunctional family, they experience trauma and pain from their parent’s actions, words, and attitudes. With this trauma experienced, they grew up changed; different from other children. The parent’s behavior affects them and whether they like it or not, sometimes it can influence them, and they can react against it or can repeat it. In Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980”, is presented this theme of the dysfunctional family. The author presents a story of an adolescent Latin boy called Junior, who narrates the chronicles of his dysfunctional family, a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic driving to a party in the Bronx, New York City. “Papi had been with

I think Yunior is the opposite of his brother Rafa. Instead of hiding his emotions and keeping everything inside, he looks for attention by acting out. He’s always in trouble, getting a “whack on the nalgas”, or a “slap on my neck”. The year when Papi was supposed to return, he threw tantrums, got hit and was punished almost every day. He rebelled by tearing his clothes, just to hurt his mom. On the day when Mami leaves

Oscar continued to teach at his old high school in New Jersey, sad and depressed everyday for three years, that is until his trip to Santo Domingo. Oscar forgot how much he had missed spending time in the Dominican. His mind was no longer filled to the brim with disappointment, stress and the feeling of being depressed. For the first time in a while, he saw beautiful

In the story, Oscar goes through difficult situations to want to interpret the role of the Dominican man. During the story, Oscar seeks a woman who gives him love and makes him feel like a man, but does not have the masculine qualities necessary to achieve his purpose. While his friend Yunior is the opposite, that is, his role in history is a man that women are always behind him by his charms, to the point that he cannot maintain a relationship with a woman because he cannot be faithful.

Throughout Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the Man Without a Face is a recurring character with no evident features. All of his scenes include an event in which he is either a mysterious spectator watching the distress around himself or joins in on the torture. His appearances throughout the story are suggestive of evil or violent incidents that are about to occur. More times than not, the acts are performed by Trujillo 's men. Almost consistently, he emerges whenever one of the main characters is in great discord. The faceless man symbolizes the foreshadowing of malicious occurrences caused by Fukú.