Oscar Wao Essay

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Yunior the narrator of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is portrayed as a true Dominican male. Representing the relationship between two friends, and how they can react with one another. Possibly causing a ripple effect with one another. At first, it seems as though Oscar, the title character, is included and depicted largely to the reader, but through a deconstructive argument it becomes clear that Oscar plays a guiding role in Yunior's comprehensive masculinity. Oscar’s demasculization begins when, at the age of seven, he is ‘caught’ crying over a girl. Prior to this event, Oscar was viewed in the community as a “little Rubirosa,” a Dominican playboy who slept with the most beautiful and rich women in the world. He even was able to maintain a relationship with two girls at the same time for a week before being forced to choose and being subsequently dumped by the girl he chose. His mother advocates the use of violence to assert his dominance over the girl, yet Oscar would never fight. Yunior says, “It wasn’t just that he didn’t have no kind of father to show him the masculine ropes, he simply lacked all aggressive and martial tendencies,” referring to this situation (15). Yunior seems to believe that a father figure would not have been able to make Oscar violent because non-violence was simply in Oscar’s nature. This lack of ‘game’ is largely assumed to be part of the family curse, but the curse’s function is more complex and subtle than preventing the de Leon line from continuing. By making Oscar as non-masculine as possible, while still maintaining his maleness, Díaz creates a character that cannot seem to get ahead in any culturally respected ways, whether through sexual conquest or the accumulation of wealth. Asencio finds that that “According to these young people ... the opposite of a macho is an effeminate male or self-identified
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