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Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Jeffrey Fisher
Final Paper
Eng 102
Professor Peterson

Trujillo and the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 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 Trujillo, people were so accustomed to the lifestyle they had to live during his regime, that Trujillo’s practices and dictator concepts still existed and is portrayed by Oscars run in with the captain after his relationship with Ybon. The theme of Dominican history is the focal point of the novel. In the opening pages Diaz explains that this novel is for “those of you who missed you mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, p. 2). In an interview with Slate Magazine Diaz explained that he had to read hundreds of books about the Trujillo regime, as well ask numerous Dominicans for local stories. This is where many of the nicknames Diaz uses in the novel to call Trujillo originate. He refers to Trujillo as “the failed cattle thief”, “T-zillo”, and “El Jefe” (Diaz, The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao P. 110). The importance of understanding the way people felt about Trujillo is a crucial aspect to understanding the significance of what Diaz is trying to explain in his stories of Oscar’s family. Diaz uses an epigraph taken from the La Nacion newspaper to explain the impact Trujillo had on the people. “Men are not indispensible. But Trujillo is irreplaceable. For Trujillo is not a man.


Cited: Abrams, Max. “Immigrants and Galactus: Junot Diaz’s World in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” English and Comparative Literary Studies Comps. Spring 2009. http//scholar.oxy.edu/ecls_student/1. Diaz, Junot. Interview. “Open Book: Junot Diaz (Full Interview)” By Deborah Landau and Meghan O’Rourke. http://dyst.slatev.com/video/open-book-junot-diaz-full-version/ 23 February 2010. 26 April 2011. Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Hanna Monica. “ ‘Reassembling the Fragments’: Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” Callaloo 33.2 (Spring 2010): 498-520. Wells, Allen. “The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo.” The Americas 66.4. (April 2010) 567-569.
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