Kind of like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. For Nanita and Trujillo, this “represented world” lacks conflict and is marked by racial purity; in Bakhtin’s words, it possesses “a radical degree of âcompletedness’” (14), by which he means an unrealistic coherence and lack of ambiguity. Even when the dictator does not interfere directly with history, the fear he engenders in his people does it for him. Over the course of the novel, however, the fukú develops a remarkable density of associations and potential meanings that never truly resolve, leaving its interpretation to inference. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). By Junot Díaz. First and foremost, Yunior, as the narrator, sets himself up in opposition to the Dominican tendency toward amnesia in dealing with a troubled past. Perhaps, then, we can consider Yunior’s narrative history (and, be extension, the novel itself) as a counterweight to the kind of history and identity forged by Trujillo. “The Exploding Planet of Junot Díaz.” Interview by Evelyn Ch’ien. the brief wondrous life oscar waoof R 80478 001-340 r2k.qxp 6/19/08 11:50 AM Page 14. Viewed from such an angle, the dream that Oscar de Leon remembers following his vicious beating in the canefields on the Haitian border appears quite sinister: An old man was standing before him in a ruined bailey, holding up a book for him to read. In so doing, he shatters the illusion wrought by Trujillo of a whole, white, pure Dominican identity. Instead, it is a “dark period” never to be referenced, a pagina en blanco (Díaz 78) or a blank page. Yunior introduces the fukú in the preface to the novel, describing it as a curse unleashed by the European colonization of the New World, the cataclysmic event responsible for the conflict between what Hall would recognize as the three Présences (1). 'The Best Novel of the 21st Century to Date' - BBC Culture. It seems ripe, then, for. In the world of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as Dr. Manhattan says, “Nothing ever ends” (Díaz 331). Thus we can see that Stuart Hall’s theory of cultural identity applies succinctly to the world of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Their very own pagina en blanco. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (TBWLoOW) deserves every star that I can give it and its narrator. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao essays are academic essays for citation. Hall’s dynamic process of reinvention. His opponent is Yunior de Las Casas, who befriends Oscar in college and narrates the novel many years after Trujillo’s death. While the images of darkness and this blank page may seem contradictory, their juxtaposition illuminates a critical distinction. The novel, in other words, allows us to see a troubling ramification of an unstable cultural identity: a conflict that resists the efforts of the Dominican people to deny it. In the novel, the dictator Rafael Trujillo capitalizes on the conflict within his people’s identity by seducing them with a palatable if whitewashed retelling of their history; in this sense, their history becomes his. In the novel, Trujillo has supernatural powers. With dazzling energy and insight Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar; and in the family's uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back. Yunior acknowledges his inability to provide the full story in all cases because the past is rarely recoverable; in the end, he says, “you’ll have to decide for yourself” (Díaz 243). (302). So he's important enough to put up front. After the imprisonment of Beli’s father Abelard, for example, Trujillo ensures that “not one single example of his handwriting remains” (Díaz 246). Hall emphasizes the relative freedom afforded by such a dynamic process of cultural identity formation, which allows a fragmented people to construct an identity that binds them together without denying their differences. Consequently, the Dominican identity as rendered by Díaz is, like Beli’s identity, somewhat damaged, somewhat lacking. The power of erasure held by Trujillo in the novel holds true to the real–life dictator’s method of rule. In addition, Nanita sets up Trujillo as the ideal Dominican in helping to construct for his people a new identity, one that deifies whiteness and racial purity. That value, however, is by no means a constant. In Díaz ’s novel, then, cultural identity becomes a site of conflict and disruption, a site in which redemption is possible but never complete. Blank pages recur throughout the novel, sometimes as pieces of paper that are literally blank, and sometimes as writing that has been lost or erased. The longevity and viability of a particular retelling of the past arise not out of its faithfulness to history but out of its value to the identity of a people. Don't be alarmed, dear readers; as the Domincan Republic's most feared dictator, Mr. Trujillo hovers over the entire novel. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Yunior accuses his people of a willingness to ignore the truth of a disagreeable past, to engage in an “amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands… the power of the Untilles” (Díaz 258–9). Striving to undo the legacy of Trujillo’s erasures, Yunior presents the novel as a rigorously truthful history of Oscar’s family and the Dominican Republic. Ubiquitous footnotes outlining the history of the Dominican Republic likewise attempt to reverse Trujillo’s suppression of historical truth. Indeed, in Díaz’s novel, unlike as in Hall’s real–world analysis, the instability and contradiction within the Dominican identity produces a major consequence: the fukú. Three themes dominate Lola's narrative: her life-and-death… In this more supernatural sense, the fukú is the effort of inescapable history to force the Dominican people to recognize its existence. Those were the words La Inca’s servant heard him say just before he broke through the plane of unconsciousness and into the universe of the Real. This preview shows page 1 - 3 out of 6 pages. For Hall, cultural identity is “grounded [not] in the archeology, but in the retelling of the past” (235). As a result, the Dominican people are especially susceptible to Trujillo’s deceptive promise of an identity free of conflict. In the novel, Présence Africaine — for Hall, “the site of the repressed” (240) — manifests itself in the mixed–race Dominicans’ disdain for, and denial of, their African origin. Here, it seems, lies the coherent narrative thread for which we have been searching, the novel’s own raison d’être. The Trujillo regime records not factual history but history as it might have occurred in the untroubled “represented world,” providing an alternative narrative to the true history of violence and fragmentation. How di… Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Accordingly, the life of Beli Cabral, who is both Oscar’s strong, imposing mother and the “orphaned girl” in the epigraph above, can be read as a microcosm of the larger forces of history and identity that pervade the book. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao offers Oscar de León as a prime example of a nice guy manhood. between Hall’s Présences; consequently, we could argue that conflict is a part of the Dominican identity. Interpreted in this manner, the dream forces Oscar to confront the emptiness of a history suppressed by centuries of authoritarian rule and cultural self–deception. Surname1 Students Name Professors Name Course Institutional Affiliate Date The Brief Wondrous Life by Oscar Wao Introduction The restructuring of history and the discovery and reevaluation of structures previously formed by the colonial regime that was imposed were part of deciding who or what would be considered Americano. its recreation. But the blankness of the book, a collection of paginas en blanco, suggests that the story of this past is untold, perhaps silenced by colonialism and dictatorship. In reference to his prolific writing, Oscar tells Yunior on the phone, “Almost had it”; later, during his impassioned address to the men who will kill him, Oscar alludes to “the thing that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop” (Díaz 320–321). “Junot Díaz: An Interview.” By Reese Kwon. It seems, at this point, that the image of the blank page in the novel stands for repression, erasure, and concealment. Introduction. By focusing on Trujillo’s flawlessness and the idealized origins of his regime, Nanita’s biography conforms to what M.M Bakhtin calls the “constitutive feature” (13) of the epic: Oscar de Leon is the character’s given name. The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you'll have to decide for yourself. Filling in the Blanks: Ambiguity, Genre, and Reader Participation as Anti-Dictatorial Forces in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao recounts the story of the nerdy and romantic Dominican-American Oscar de León while situating him within a larger and more Filling the Blank Pages in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Filling the Blank Pages. The theme of identity — its origins, its power, its pitfalls — pervades the novel, at both individual and collective levels. 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