Though physically broken, he survived and embarked on an ambitious writing project that he hoped would make him “the Dominican Tolkien.”. Even a woman as potent as La Inca, who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Banί her own personal Lothlόrien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye. Like the de Leon family, the mongoose is an immigrant, an invasive, non-native species. The novel’s plot is intricately bound up with the notion of Fukú Americanus, which is “generally a curse of doom of some kind; specifically, the Curse or Doom of the New World”. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.

If the book's called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, then why is the madman Rafael Leónidas Trujillo one of the first characters we meet in it?Don't be alarmed, dear readers; as the Domincan Republic's most feared dictator, Mr. Trujillo hovers over the entire novel.

Oscar falls into a deep depression and attempts suicide on the last day of the school year. VanBeest argues that Oscar "succeeds in educating Yunior, indirectly, in the responsibilities of manhood; after Oscar's death, Yunior claims that it is Oscar's influence that encourages him to stop following the dictates of el machismo and finally settle down and get married."

Beli lives with her aunt, La Inca, in Baní, a fairly poor neighborhood of Santo Domingo.

Furthermore, when Trujillo is referenced by Yunior in his narration, the descriptions are entirely negative. Throughout the novel, violence is transmitted from the system of colonialism and dictators to the domestic sphere and perpetuated through the generations. The idea that an individual has the power the change the effects of the curse in their own life is a way for the novel to show that Dominican culture can be changed in a way that marginalized people can have power[29].

Instead of Díaz directly telling the story to the reader, he creates an aesthetic distance by speaking through the novel's narrator Yunior. At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron's evil was taken by "a great wind" and neatly "blown away", with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. She donates all her savings to her boyfriend’s family and bids her mother farewell at the airport.

He supports the regime in order to keep his family safe, but runs out of luck when Trujillo decides he wants to seduce Abelard’s beautiful oldest daughter Jacquelyn.

In this way, zafa can be read as an undoing of colonialism because as fuku brings misery and bad luck, zafa has the potential to foil it and restore a more favorable balance. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

"But what was even more ironic was that Abelard had a reputation for being able to keep his head down during the worst of the regime's madness—for unseeing, as it were.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao essays are academic essays for citation.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz tells the story of Oscar, a Dominican-American boy who is obsessed with science fiction, fantasy, and finding love, and whose family is haunted by a generational curse.Explore a character analysis of Yunior, plot summary, and important quotes. The threads of the story that tell of Oscar’s family, in particular those set in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s reign of terror, are the most captivating, brought to life by Díaz’s playful voice, which is liberally peppered with Spanish (and especially Dominican) slang and sci-fi references, a style representative of Gabriel García Márquez’s "Macondo" turned "McOndo": magic realism for the diaspora generation. Kind of like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.

Lola gets married and moves to Miami. Her father was imprisoned after failing to bring his wife and daughter to meet some government officials, as he fears they will be taken by them. Here's where you'll find analysis about the book as a whole. The preceding pages of Chapter 8 wrap things up for Yunior and Lola, but Oscar has largely disappeared from view. The novel then switches to Lola’s perspective. Upon discovering her mother has breast cancer, she escapes with her new lover. While the encounters with the creature may or may not have happened, their significance in the book still holds strong just like the superstitions, because "no matter what you believe, the fukú believes in you" (5). In chapter two, Lola narrates her own story from the first person. Continue your study of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao with these useful links. Still, Yunior proves his friendship by coming back to room with Oscar for another year. His actions eventually resulted in Trujillo arranging for his arrest and eighteen-year sentence, where he was brutally beaten and treated to an endless series of electric shock treatments (237).

Similarly, Oscar remembers a "Golden Mongoose" which appeared just before he throws himself from the bridge [38] and again when he is beaten in the canefield for the first time. This is foreshadowing of the intimacy between Lola and Yunior yet to come. [32] By reconstructing the De Leon family story, and not letting the characters speak for themselves, Yunior subconsciously follows the ‘Trujillan model of narration’, suppressing their own stories for his own mental gain whether it be a recreated connection to Lola, his ex-girlfriend or Oscar, his friend[32]. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel written by Dominican American author Junot Díaz, published in 2007.Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey in the United States, where Díaz was raised, and it deals with the Dominican Republic experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. Instant downloads of all 1360 LitChart PDFs

These Beli and Oscar canefield scenes are haunted by the displacement and violence against enslaved Africans, the displacement and genocide of indigenous folks, and also the revolts and resistance to these systems.

Feel free to get in touch with us via email to: We use cookies to create the best experience for you.

All delivered papers are samples meant to be used only for research purposes. He is depressed due to his low self-esteem and lack of social life. Visit BN.com to buy new and used textbooks, and check out our award-winning NOOK tablets and eReaders. Even when talking about Oscar, Yunior does not focus on the fact that he is nerdy and does not hide it, but rather makes illusions to science fiction and fantasy works that Oscar would be familiar with. [31] Because of the way that the story is narrated, the readers get a comprehensive view of the cultural factors that surround Oscar that ultimately lead to his tragic death. When Oscar meets Ana, one of the many women with whom he falls in love, he notices different aspects of her life and "there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks".

Yunior prefaces his biography of Oscar with a description of the legendary fukú curse that originated in Africa and arrived in the Caribbean when Spanish colonists transported slaves across the Atlantic. He tries to kill himself but fails.

Lola is sent to the DR to attend school and live with her great-aunt. [35] Furthermore, in a footnote, the mongoose is described as "an enemy of kingly charriots, chains, and hierarchies... an ally of Man",[36] suggesting the mongoose's importance in helping the de Leon family not just for their misfortune but also as a means of undermining Trujillo's oppression.

Over the next three years, his life grew increasingly formulaic and depressing. Oscar survived the attack and returned to New Jersey, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Ybón and returned to Santo Domingo the first chance he got. Yunior is given the power to represent Trujillo which lessens Trujillos dominance in the power scale, allowing the novel to have a strong stance against the dictatorship, stripping Trujillo of the meaning behind his title[28]. When interpreted as magic instead of as the literal actions of white people, the fuku and zafa transcend human beings and remind us that even when colonialism is not particularly obvious, it is a force that looms over all, and its effects must first be confronted before anyone can take action accordingly, as Yunior's dream suggests.

Growing older, she became boy crazy and fell in love with “the gangster” who worked for Trujillo.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes extensive use of footnotes to the point that many of the characters are developed in the footnotes in addition to the story. Oscar recuperates and graduates from Rutgers. Yunior researches Oscar’s life and family, revealing that the entire book was written so that Yunior could piece together his own thoughts about the Dominican American experience. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Homework Help Questions. Rather than just provide factual background, Yunior's narrative continues in the footnotes just as it does in the body of the novel.

We lied. He struggles to socialize and get a girlfriend.

As for Yunior, Oscar models an alternative form of masculinity and ultimately pushes him to reexamine his ideas about manhood. Through its overarching theme of the fukú curse, it additionally contains elements of magic realism. What more fantasy than the Antilles? Fearing for Beli’s life, La Inca sent her to live in New York. Lola calms him down, and Oscar decides to wait until college to find a new love. Beli refuses, and the Gangster’s wife has Beli beaten and left for dead.

These references serve both to illuminate the world that Oscar lives in and create a parallel between the supernatural events in fantasy literature and the history of the Dominican Republic. Although by the end none of the characters seem to have escaped the cycle of violence or the effects of fukú, Yunior has a dream in which Oscar waves a blank book at him, and he realizes that this can be a "zafa" (325) to the family curse. By referencing “nothing ever ends” on page 331 in the novel, Diaz proposes that the past cannot be changed, but must ultimately be accepted in order to create a better future and reclaim the culture[29].