from high school is rather noneventful, and the beginning of college doesn't show much promise, either.

Chapter 2 focuses on Lola, who is Oscar's sister. She has had a difficult relationship with her mother, who has been battling cancer. Her mother is controlling, and when Lola tries to assert her own independence, they end up in a heated argument. Eventually, Lola runs away from home to live with a boyfriend, Aldo. This arrangement isn't ideal, either, and Lola hates both her new home and the job she is forced to get.

When Aldo begins making racist comments, Lola finally calls Oscar and arranges to meet him. Oscar surprises Lola by bringing their mother with him, and Lola is then sent to Santo Domingo for a year. Living there with her great-aunt is much more peaceful than living with her mother, and Lola considers living in the Dominican Republic even longer. Lola has an odd feeling that she can't seem to shake and grows to appreciate the warmth of her great-aunt even more as she connects with her family's history. Therefore, being forced to live with her great-aunt in the Dominican Republic is an event that brings much-needed peace to Lola's tumultuous existence.

The third chapter of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao focuses on the backstory of Lola and Oscar’s mother, Beli. The chapter begins by relating Beli’s school days. Beli goes through typical conflicts of a young girl who is struggling to fit in and grow up. Beli becomes rather boy-crazy, but as she matures, this becomes more of a problem, because Beli is quite well endowed. The boys like her in return, and this gets her into trouble.

Beli experiences class conflict when Jack becomes her lover but only in secret because he is of a higher social class. When they are caught, he lies about their relationship.

Beli continues to grow, and she experiences conflict within herself as she longs for more independence. She takes a job as a waitress, and this leads to conflict with her foster mother. Her mother is even more horrified when Beli becomes involved with “the Gangster.” He is a married man and the brother of the dictator as well. When Beli becomes pregnant, she finds herself in major trouble. She is severely beaten and miscarries the baby.

When Beli is lying in the field after the beating, she experiences another internal conflict as she struggles to survive and receives the revelation that she must for the sake of the two children she will someday have. Beli is rescued, but her mother has to send her to New York for her own safety.

We can see both internal and external conflicts in this chapter, then, as Beli struggles with the realities of growing up and the difficulties and dangers of relationships. Herein lie the chapter’s primary themes as well. These include poor decisions and their consequences, the desire for love (and the problem of looking for it in the wrong places), and the brutality and oppression faced by people under a dictatorship.

Power, particularly as it relates to one's gender, is an essential element to Oscar Wao. Trujillo is, of course, the man with the most power: his dictatorship is bloody and cruel. Yet there are other men in this novel who also wield power: Yunior, who has the power to speak (he is the one telling us Oscar's story, as Oscar no longer can), and the other male characters who display violent and misogynistic tendencies: Jack Pujols, who uses Beli for sex and then abandons her; the Gangster, who not only is Trujillo's brother-in-law but also is a pathological liar to Beli; and the Capitan, an abuser of women and of his power (which he flexes to have people killed), are just a few that come to mind.

While some of the female characters are strong, they are still subject to a Dominican culture that worships "machismo" and reveres the submissive woman. Though Beli is fierce and resilient, she also falls victim to male predators, and Lola consistently finds herself in relationships with abusive men. Diaz is asking us to question how cultural norms inform gendered interactions. The rampant misogyny and its relationship to people who hold power makes women wonder if they must become like Beli (cruel and hardened) in order to endure the oppression of the established patriarchy.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was written by Junot Díaz and published in 2007. The novel tells the story of American Dominican Oscar Wao (real name Oscar de Leon).

One of the major conflicts of the story is cultural identity. Many of the characters struggle with their dual or multiple cultural identities. This conflict is instrumental in their feelings of isolation. For example, Oscar struggles with being both American and Dominican. His lack of masculinity alienates him from the Dominican community, whilst his nerdiness alienates him from his American peers.

The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy.

Whilst Lola wants to free herself from the traditional Dominican role she is expected to play, Beli works a number of jobs and is unsure of her role in society. Unlike Oscar, Yunior adopts the Dominican masculinity (due to fear of rejection) but this only causes him unhappiness and loneliness.

I would also add that a major conflict is fate vs. free will--in this case, at it relates to the "fuku," the supposed curse on the family and Dominicans in general. Oscar's quest to be loved and to be redeemed comes into conflict with several forces--American society, his past, Dominican gangsters--that challenge his ability to live the life he aspires to.

One other subcurrent is the narrator, who must come to grips with Oscar's actions and his relationship to Lola and the rest of  Oscar and Lola's family.

There are two conflicts primarily present in this story.  The first one is man vs. society.  From Oscar's family history in the Dominican Republic, readers learn that discriminatory behavior towards the family is the cause of many of their problems.  Beli's sisters were killed by a totalitarian leader.  Beli herself was ostracized for her appearance and then beaten by the same totalitarian leader.  In New Jersey, the family suffers from a lack of acceptance due to their cultural background, leaving Oscar to feel alienated and  unloved.  Society has put undue pressure on the characters.

However, at the true heart of the story, is a man vs. self conflict.  Diaz focuses less on this issue of society in her narration, and more on the reactionary behavior of the characters.  These characters make bad decisions based on their needs and suffer as a result.  Beli and Oscar both want acceptance so badly that they get invovled in dangerous and forbidden relationships.  If they reacted more positively to their needs, each character would have experienced a less brutal life line. 

The genre of Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is magical realism, a subgenre of realistic fiction which incorporates elements of fantasy and myth. These elements of fantasy and myth are woven into an otherwise realistic narrative, so they seem both natural and believable. Magical realism is more typically characteristic of writers from non-Western cultures and locations, such as Latin America. Gabriel García Márquez's beautiful novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered a seminal work in the genre of magical realism.

Junot Diaz alerts his readers to the fantastic thread that will run through his narrative, which borrows facts from Diaz's own life as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic growing up in New Jersey, even before the start of chapter one. By way of background, the reader is told of the powerful Dominican belief in the presence of the Fuku, a supernatural force of karmic retribution, as subtle as air and as certain as life and death, that "always gets its man." This description of the Fuku provides the ominous and omnipresent shadow under which Oscar, the novel's ill-fated, love-obsessed character will live:

It's perfectly fine if you don't believe in these "superstitions." In fact, it's better than fine—it's perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fuku believes in you.

Magical realism as a genre works perfectly in Junot Diaz's story to integrate the elements of a traditional coming-of-age story with the very real experience of what it means to exist as a cultural outsider. Oscar embodies every teen's struggle to fit in, with the added necessity of integrating his Dominican heritage with the day-to-day reality of growing up as an immigrant in the United States.

• Coming-of-age story (Bildungsroman)
• Immigrant fiction
• Historical fiction
• Quest literature
• Comedy
• Tragedy
• Epic
• Science fiction: e.g., Isaac Asimov
• Fantasy: e.g., Lord of the Rings
• Comic book: e.g., Spider Man
• Intertextual literature: e.g., Oscar Wilde
• Picaresque: e.g., Invisible Man
• Pop Culture Homage: e.g., Dr. No, Land of the Lost
• Dominican History: e.g., Trajillo

Junot Diaz’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the story of Oscar De León, who, like Diaz, is a Dominican growing up in New Jersey.

One theme explored in this work is the nature of masculine identity. Oscar is nerdy and overweight, not the ideal of male Dominican machismo. The character Yunior is the opposite in both appearance and values—physically strong, at times violent, sexually aggressive, and unemotional. The friends have a sort of yin-yang dynamic. Oscar sees Yunior as a guide to traditional masculinity while Yunior admires Oscar’s wit and ability to cultivate emotionally intimate relationships. This exploration of themes of gender and identity are also evident in the novel’s villain, the Dominican dictator Trujillo, who exemplifies the negative aspects of hypermasculinity.

Another important theme of the novel is the supernatural. Oscar has a preoccupation with the sci-fi and fantasy genres, and allusions to fantasy are woven throughout the novel. A prominent aspect of the supernatural in the novel is the fuku curse that haunts Oscar’s family, bringing violence and misery. The zafa works as a counterspell, the power to undo the curse. This treatment of the supernatural gives the novel an element of magical realism, blending fantasy and reality.

The novel also explores the theme of foreignness. Oscar and his family are in some ways outsiders as Dominicans living in New Jersey. However, when they return to the Dominican Republic, they still feel like visiting outsiders rather than true natives. Additionally, Oscar’s obsession with fantasy and sci-fi makes him somewhat of an outsider in his Dominican community. Diaz thus turns his attention to the many ways we distinguish the “other” and questions what it really means to belong.

Díaz writes in The Brief Wondrous Life...about the Trujillo dictatorship time period of the Dominican Republic and about contemporary New Jersey. He blends these stories using different character's narratives.

The novel has very interesting narrators, Oscar’s sister, Lola and Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and Lola’s boyfriend. They try to uplift Oscar.

Later inthe novel, the reader learns about Oscar and Lola’s mother, Beli. She is very tough and her childhood was full of  pain. She had a wealthy father who was tortured by Rafael Trujillo, the dictator. She suffered a lot under the brutal life in the D.R. She had an affair with the son of a high ranking official inthe D.R. She was savagly beaten in the cane fields, as a result of the affair. She almost died which made her come to the U.S., in exile.

His(Diaz) prose is full of slang and both captures the dictatorship and how it was living under that as well as the issue of being an over-weight, geek college student. Like David Foster Wallace, he leaves a lot of footnotes, that help the reader understand the context of the book.

Having said all that, it is a difficult book to read because of the dual stories told, in different cultural settings by different narrators, with Diaz's use of slang.

It shows the effects of the Dominion Republic diaspora to the U.S. and a geek growing up in New Jersey where many Dominican's migrated.