When growing up, people live different lives, even when brought up in the same household. In the story “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, the protagonist is a young overweight Dominican Republic nerdy boy, who lives in New Jersey. All Oscar wants is to find his true love, but he constantly gets his heartbroken. Oscar’s first love is Ana Obregon. This woman uses Oscar for emotional support. After Oscar falls in love, Ana returns to her abusive boyfriend. Trying to be the hero and save Ana from her abusive life, Oscar comes up with the idea of shooting her boyfriend, but the opportunity did not arise. After this we switch to Oscar’s older sister Lola and his mother’s story. Lola and her mother do not get along very well. Constantly being belittled, causing Lola to run away and live with a boy named Aldo. After being away for a while she is caught by her mother and forced to come home, just to be sent to the Dominican Republic, to live with her Grandmother. This is when she hears the story of her mother’s life. Her Falling in love with a bad guy and then being nearly beaten to death by the bad guy’s girlfriend. The book carries on talking about different characters live giving you a view on how they were raised and how they view the world. Then we return to Oscar, who is in college and we continue his story. He is still looking for his love and will not stop till he finds her.
Oscar is a fat ghetto nerd, who can’t fit in anywhere and is seen as an outcast. All Oscar wants in his life is to find his one true love. To find a person that will love him as much as he loves her. Oscar loves comics, novels and television shows. He is seen by other Dominican Republic people as not Dominican because he is not as masculin...
... middle of paper ...
...r. In the end they both found their own piece of happiness.
The characters Oscar and Lola are similar, but because of their gender and physical traits, they were treated differently and was able to use that and form their own separate life. Oscar grow up in a different school environment than his sister, which made him want to stay home and write novels. Lola had a different home life than Oscar, which made her want to run away from her family and seek freedom out. Oscar would look for love and tell that person how he felt, but Lola did not have to look for love the men came to her and she used sex to show her freedom and how she feels about the person she was dating. They both looked for destructive relationship, Oscar went for taken women and Lola went for men that was abusive or disrespectful to her. At the end they were able to find happiness in their own way.
The relationships between mothers and daughters is a topic that authors often call upon to tell a story. It is an important part of every culture, which makes the topic relatable to any reader who picks the book up. Junot Diaz understood the universality of mother/daughter relationships and incorporated it in his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Although the book is mainly about Oscar, an overweight Dominican boy from New Jersey and his quest for love, the book also spends a lot of time exploring the relationships between Oscar’s sister Lola and their mother Beli and Beli’s relationship with her mother figure La Inca. Junot Diaz does not write mother/daughter relationships in an honest way and focuses on the conflict in the relationships
Holly Janquell is a runaway. Wendelin Van Draanan creates a twelve year old character in the story, Runaway, that is stubborn and naive enough to think she can live out in the streets alone, until she is eighteen.She has been in five foster homes for the past two years. She is in foster care because her mother dies of heroin overdose. In her current foster home, she is abused, locked in the laundry room for days without food, and gets in even more trouble if she tries to fight back. Ms.Leone, her schoolteacher, could never understand her, and in Holly’s opinion, probably does not care. No one knows what she is going through, because she never opens up to any one. Ms. Leone gives Holly a journal at school one day and tells her to write poetry and express her feelings. Holly is disgusted. But one day when she is sitting in the cold laundry room, and extremely bored, she pulls out the diary, and starts to write. When Holly can take no more of her current foster home, she runs, taking the journal with her. The journal entries in her journal, are all written as if she is talking to Ms.Leone, even though she will probably never see her again. Over the course of her journey, Holly learns to face her past through writing, and discovers a love for poetry. At some point in this book, Holly stops venting to Ms. Leone and starts talking to her, almost like an imaginary friend, and finally opens up to her.
In Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, he tells 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 broke up and his life seemed to be on a steady decline since then.
Abelard started this whole mess but the love of his family was too strong, he would rather his family broken up than together and possibly miserable. Lola’s problems with mother-daughter love stem 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 is the clear cut reason why anger and love influence the impulsive and reckless decisions the characters make in their lives. Works Cited Diaz, Junot.
Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is focused on the hyper-masculine culture of the Dominican, and many argue that his portrayal of the slew of women in the novel is misogynistic because they are often silenced by the plot and kept out of the narration (Matsui). However, Diaz crafts strong women, and it is society that views them as objects. The novel recognizes the masculine lens of the culture while still examining the lives of resilient women. In this way, the novel showcases a feminist stance and critiques the misogynist culture it is set in by showcasing the strength and depth of these women that help to shape the narrative while acknowledging that it is the limits society places on them because of their sexuality
Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, set in the late 1900’s, tells a story of Oscar Wao, an overweight Dominican “ghetto nerd”, his mother and rebellious sister who live together in Paterson, New Jersey. Throughout the novel, Diaz incorporates many different stories about each character that show acts of resistance. One of the most prominent stories of resistance in the novel is through Oscar’s mom; Beli, who is prompted by great tragedy, known as the Trujillo curse, to love atomically and thus follow a dangerous path. Beli’s family history plays a large role in her choices that eventually compel her into a different life than what her adopted mother, La Inca, had wanted
Both stories show the characters inequality with their lives as women bound to a society that discriminates women. The two stories were composed in different time frames of the women’s rights movement; it reveals to the readers, that society was not quite there in the fair treatment towards the mothers, daughters, and wives of United States in either era. Inequality is the antagonist that both authors created for the characters. Those experiences might have helped that change in mankind to carve a path for true equality among men and women.
Finally, even though, for a long time, the roles of woman in a relationship have been established to be what I already explained, we see that these two protagonists broke that conception and established new ways of behaving in them. One did it by having an affair with another man and expressing freely her sexuality and the other by breaking free from the prison her marriage represented and discovering her true self. The idea that unites the both is that, in their own way, they defied many beliefs and started a new way of thinking and a new perception of life, love and relationships.
...re many similarities when it comes to technique, characterization, themes, and ideologies based on the author's own beliefs and life experiences. However, we also see that it appears the author herself often struggles with the issue of being herself and expressing her own individuality, or obeying the rules, regulations and mores of a society into which she was born an innocent child, one who by nature of her sex was deemed inferior to men who controlled the definition of the norms. We see this kind of environment as repressive and responsible for abnormal psyches in the plots of many of her works.
The physical abuse between Ana and her boyfriend, Manny, enforce the acceptance of physical violence and misogyny in the Dominican world. As an outcast to the Dominican culture, Oscar stands up for Ana which emphasizes the normalcy of abusive relationships. However, as Oscar stands up for Ana he starts to become violent, which enforces the Dominican machismo. Even though Oscar has good intentions against the violence and misogyny, he embodies his Dominican culture by acting violently, which implies the culturally embedded machismo cycle of misogyny and violence. Another violent male character is the Gangster, who by his name creates a violent opinion of him. His relationship with Beli incites his Another act of male violence is developed through the relationship between the Gangster and Beli. First off, the character is named Gangster which automatically creates a violent appeal towards him. Gangster worked for Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, and eventually caused violent harm to Beli, despite their relationship. This further develops the machismo violence in the Dominican culture. The Dominican men and the white slave owners are fulfilling their societal norms, which suggest that the view of men in these cultures are as violent, powerful
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is one of the most significant laws in American History. Before the ADA was passed, employers were able to deny employment to a disabled worker, simply because he or she was disabled. With no other reason other than the person's physical disability, they were turned away or released from a job. The ADA gives civil rights protections to individuals with disabilities similar to those provided to individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, age, and religion. The act guarantees equal opportunity for individuals with disabilities in public accommodations, employment, transportation, State and local government services, and telecommunications. The ADA not only opened the door for millions of Americans to get back into the workplace, it paved the road for new facilities in the workplace, new training programs, and created jobs designed for a disabled society (Frierson, 1990). This paper will discuss disabilities covered by the ADA, reasonable accommodations employers must take to accommodate individuals with disabilities, and the actions employers can take when considering applicants who have disabilities.
The ADA prohibits employer discrimination against qualified individuals with a disability in regard to application procedures, hiring and firing, promotions, pay, training, and other terms, conditions, and privileges of employment (Hernandez, 2001). This applies to the entire range of employer-employee relationships, including testing, work assignments, discipline, leave, benefits, and lay-offs. In addition, the ADA prohibits retaliation against individuals w...
The homosocial relationship between the main character and their best friend connects these two novels by showing how the main character has the same purpose of taking revenge against the one who killed their loved ones, and the best friend who is always there to help and take care of the main character so he can complete his goal. The differences between them make the relationship closer and stronger, and it is proven by the authors through out the novels that no other person can take the place of their best friend.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, TITLE 42 - THE PUBLIC HEALTH AND WELFARE U.S.C. § 12101 - 12117 et seq. (Author 1990 ).
The ADA has been called the most meaningful act since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Activists said, “’It’s the first declaration of independence and equity for people with disabilities…It’s like the Berlin Wall coming down’” (O’Brien 162). The ADA is divided into five titles each addressing a different area of concern for the disabled. Title I protects the disabled from discrimination in the work place. Since the adoption of the ADA, Title I has had little impact on the rate of disabled people being hired for new jobs; furthermore, disabled individuals facing discrimination in their current jobs have found little justice through new legal avenues provided by Title I. Most cases are filed by disabled workers who are requesting appropriate accommodations from their employer, in many of these instances; accommodations entail slight adjustments to the employees’ work area by installing ramps or railings. Unfortunately, many employers see the adjustments as a hassle and disabled employees are forced to work in subpar conditions.