Oscar Wao Analysis

The Ted talk given by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie describes the dangers of a single story. A single story is told here as a story that is told with the same singular view. Adichie describes how she started reading and writing when she was younger, although her writing only ever contained characters who were white and blue-eyed. She says how the books she read only ever had people like this and who drank ginger beer, Adichie wanted to drink this ginger beer although she had no idea what it was. But these were the things she thought were supposed to be in books since it was the only books she had read. Adichie moves on to give other examples of single stories and one is when she moves to the states and learns that her roommate was shocked by Adichie. …show more content…
In the story, a true Dominican is a gangster/macho guy who controls what he believes is inferior to men which in this novel woman are, a man who is verbally or physically aggressive, a man with sexual drive, basically a lady’s man and with a muscular body or physically attractive male. Without these traits, you were not considered or resembled a Dominican Men. Oscar from the beginning of the book was labeled as so un-Dominican because of how the narrator introduces him, “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t a homerun hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock” (pg. 11) Oscar’s difficulty throughout the story is his incapability to symbolize the hero of what a Dominican male was considered mentally and physically. His uncle, Tio Rodolfo, according to the narrator was also was an example of a true Dominican, on an occasion he tells Oscar, “Listen Palomo: you have to grab a muchacha, y meteselo. That will take care of everything, start with a fea. Coje that fea y meteselo” (pg, 24) Oscar, Tio was a macho guy, he calls him a birdy and advises him grab a girl, with is an expression of a macho man and stick it in, he moves on to tell him you should start with an ugly one. Oscar breaks the single story of the Stereo type of what a “Dominican man” is portrayed …show more content…
Single stories keeping people from accepting others and tend to ruin chances of a friendship when you’ve only been given one side of a story. We begin with the Ted Talk given by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie, she talks about the way she felt when he roommate thought she’d be poor and not well educated. Then we see how Oscar Wao who loves Sci-Fi and isn’t a “papi chulo” has mixed feelings because he isn’t the single-story males are made out to be in Dominican culture. We read about Dany who is a hardworking Haitian, working two jobs to get his wife into the country and once she is in he keeps working to find a better place for both of them to live in. All these people and characters are viewed as a single whole, and a single embodiment of a single-story, which in reality is a small percentage of their countries. Adichie talks about the professional friends she has in Africa whom have made a career out of themselves, and how if maybe more people were made aware of the fact that there are more professionals in her continent that they’d realize there is more than meets the