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Discourse And Narrative: Creating Gender Control In Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Charles Lee
Discourse And Narrative: Creating Gender Control In Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Charles Lee
Honors Theses
Junot Diaz's Pulitzer-Prize-Winning 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores Dominican masculinity through narrator Yunior de Las Casas's portrayal of protagonist Oscar de Leon's family history. Yunior's perceived virility shapes his understanding of masculinity, which he stresses through the novel's plot and structure. This analysis considers how Yunior constructs Dominican masculinity through his narrative by marginalizing and emasculating passive character such as Oscar. I argue that Yunior's narrative closely links definition of masculinity and power as he strives to dominate passive characters in order to assert his virility as the "best" method for being a Dominican man.