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Essay / The theme of love and madness in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Love is intrinsically linked to madness. All of history has proven that love is not only blind but deaf, and yet it stubbornly persists as one of the most defining characteristics of the human condition. It certainly persists throughout Junot Díaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, defying reason, rhyme, and all pretensions of reason. Love in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is akin to an illness, an illness from which none of the characters fully recovers. In his role as narrator, Yunior strives to make readers understand that the problems plaguing the novel's characters, especially Oscar, are all linked to the historical curse of fukú, the supernatural power believed to haunt the De Leòn family. However, the real curse of the De Leòn family is not the supernatural fukú, invoked by people when they cannot explain why truly terrible and truly wonderful things happen in the world; it is love, or its perversion, as Oscar and the De Leòns understand it. Díaz refutes the notion of the supernatural by illustrating Oscar as a character consumed by love, he literally goes mad at the prospect of it, and in doing so perpetuates his family's individualized fukú. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Throughout The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar De Leòn reveals himself to be irrevocably enamored of false understandings of what It really is and means love. . Oscar is addicted to imagining himself in love with any girl who recognizes him, whether it's Ana, Jenni or the many girls he passes on the street. “His affection – that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire and lust that he directed towards every girl in his neighborhood without regard to appearance, age or availability – him broke the heart every day” (Díaz 23). Oscar doesn't fall in love, he falls into desire, physical desire, but also the desire for companionship, for something, anything, that will make him feel less of a stranger, less of an other. These are not, in and of themselves, desires that Oscar should be. blamed him or having held him against him, or having destroyed him; however, they become so because of the enormity with which he reacts if he does not fulfill them. During his Ana stage (Ana who is not so much his first love as his first rejection, as this is the pattern for most of his (brief) life), Oscar actually waits outside his boyfriend with a gun, ready to shoot him. . Yes, Manny is an abuser and a pervert, for dating a 13 year old when he's 24, and maybe he deserves some sort of reward, but nonetheless, Oscar looks at his obsession with Ana and what she can do for him, make him feel physically and emotionally like the equivalent of love, and it's wrong. Oscar has a way of clinging to girls he adores, in his own way, but who treat him, at best, like a friend to be pitied, and when the final rejection comes, Oscar snaps. Jenni is an extreme example, as it is her rejection that causes Oscar to attempt suicide. Her nickname "La Jablesse" suggests something diabolical about her while adding a sense of diabolical intent to her relationship with Oscar, and it reflects the way all the other women in the novel lure Oscar toward self-destruction, the same destruction that Yunior confuses. with fukú.Oscar believes that Ybón is the only true love of his life, as the beginning of his real life, but in reality his relationship proves that once again he fails to accurately assess the meaning of love. About his relationship with.