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Why The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

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During the 1930’s, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was the dictator of the Dominican Republic. Corrupt Trujillo ruled with an iron fist and maintained control by using the unscrupulous patronage system for appointing people to important offices, discretely murdering political opponents, and enforcing strict censorship laws. Many countries invested into the Dominican Republic without Knowing the horrors that the Regime was causing for the povern stricken people. Junot Diaz was raised in the Dominican Republic’s chaos and a sense of unity has been forced upon him for survival as a result. Diaz wrote The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to express the complicated emotions and problems he faced during his childhood moving from the Dominican Republic …show more content…

The main metaphor in the book is the title The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao itself. The word “Wondrous” describes the inspiring, uplifting, rewarding, encouraging story that Diaz writes through Oscar’s story. However, the word “Brief” conveys the sad and morbid fact that Oscar dies young. The name Oscar Wao sounds extremely similar to the writer Oscar Wilde because of the Spanish background of the book Wilde is pronounce as Wao. The name combines the two culture of Spanish and English which represents Diaz background. The combination of cultures foreshadows the fact the Diaz will use Spanish and English language throughout the book which he does. Diaz states “his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huáscar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong” (276). Diaz finishes his combination of English and Spanish through Oscar realizing that he does belong and classifies the Dominican Republic as a mixture itself. The fact that the Dominican Republic is a mixture of English and Spanish shows that a nation is represented by its individuals and since the individuals possess qualities from different culture the Dominican is consider a mixture of those

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