The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao By Junot Diaz

Twentieth-century texts, specifically that of American literature, which address diaspora and the effects of displacement, exhibit a purposeful distortion of reality in efforts to define what reality is. It is important then, within such texts, to examine the depiction of a character’s subjective experience in response to their extreme circumstances. When personal circumstances evolve, and what was once the mundane or the ordinary, digress into an array of cataclysm, the self too, digresses in response, creating a subsequent shift in identity or self-identification. Identity in essence becomes a term attributed to the attempt to change and integrate the self along a different social paradigm reflective of the immediate cultural atmosphere and …show more content…
By engaging with multiple literary structures and various forms of writing, Díaz not only attempts to construct an alternative identity and history for the silenced “páginas en blanco”, but also attempts to invent a historical coherence for the world. Through a commentary mode of writing, Díaz establishes a voice, not only for an American consciousness, but also for a Dominican-American engagement with an American consciousness. For those of us “who missed [our] mandatory two seconds of Dominican history”, Díaz engages with various narratives about what it means for displaced Dominicans to inherit an American identity. Díaz’s constant engagement in multiple styles of writing, genres, and narrative perspectives is essential to the thematic representation of the multiplicity of diaspora. This paper will discuss Díaz’s inclusion of multiple languages, intertextuality, popular culture references, fragmented histories, and application of poly-vocal narration enhances and captures the depiction of Dominican diaspora and the experiences of cultural