Interpretive Essay
A Real Dominican Man
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the reader is led through the novel with a lot of uncertain thoughts and questions about the main characters, one in particular Oscar Wao. When I first started working on the assignment my topic was what and who is a real Dominican man? What characteristics does a true Dominican man have? Why isn’t Oscar like all the other Dominican Men? I found it strange that as I began to look through passages I was finding more of what the opposite of a real Dominican man was. The narrator seemed to mostly use the main character Oscar Wao to show the good and bad in Dominican man. In the first chapter we see that progression of Oscar Wao from being a “typical” Dominican man to miserably failing the “so-called” characteristics and personality of a real Dominican man. My goal of this paper is to examine certain passages to get a clearer idea of what characters fall into Yunior’s placement of a real Dominican Man. It seems as though the narrator is defining a real Dominican Man as one that doesn’t really care about girls and takes advantage of them. Also it seems that many people use the words “typical” and “normal” to describe a true Dominican Man, I wonder if they mean a typical/normal man is one that has the perfect looks and so called perfect personality. But to me it seems as though the personality part is defined as being a jerk. I am going to do this by looking through passages and interpret what I believe the narrator is trying to convince the readers. The first piece of evidence that I looked at comes from the very first chapter of the novel “The Golden Age”. This beginning of the chapter represents a time where Oscar fulfills the characteristics of a ‘typical” Dominican man in the eyes of everyone around him. The specific passage that I have found is on page thirteen where the narrator explains how, “ It truly was a Golden Age for Oscar, one that its apotheosis in the fall of his seventh
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the reader is led through the novel with a lot of uncertain thoughts and questions about the main characters, one in particular Oscar Wao. When I first started working on the assignment my topic was what and who is a real Dominican man? What characteristics does a true Dominican man have? Why isn’t Oscar like all the other Dominican Men? I found it strange that as I began to look through passages I was finding more of what the opposite of a real Dominican man was. The narrator seemed to mostly use the main character Oscar Wao to show the good and bad in Dominican man. In the first chapter we see that progression of Oscar Wao from being a “typical” Dominican man to miserably failing the “so-called” characteristics and personality of a real Dominican man. My goal of this paper is to examine certain passages to get a clearer idea of what characters fall into Yunior’s placement of a real Dominican Man. It seems as though the narrator is defining a real Dominican Man as one that doesn’t really care about girls and takes advantage of them. Also it seems that many people use the words “typical” and “normal” to describe a true Dominican Man, I wonder if they mean a typical/normal man is one that has the perfect looks and so called perfect personality. But to me it seems as though the personality part is defined as being a jerk. I am going to do this by looking through passages and interpret what I believe the narrator is trying to convince the readers. The first piece of evidence that I looked at comes from the very first chapter of the novel “The Golden Age”. This beginning of the chapter represents a time where Oscar fulfills the characteristics of a ‘typical” Dominican man in the eyes of everyone around him. The specific passage that I have found is on page thirteen where the narrator explains how, “ It truly was a Golden Age for Oscar, one that its apotheosis in the fall of his seventh
Cited: Díaz, Junot. The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.