The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao: When Love Ties Into Violence

Love is a strong emotion used throughout this book but also has a direct connection to violence. Junot Diaz being the author of the book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao represents strong emotions for love which ties into violence. The main characters that are shown in this book are Yunior, Oscar, Lola, Beli, and Abelard. All these characters have had some relation to love or violence. These types of emotions range from domestic violence to cruel violence that occurs punishment of loving too much or having a relationship with the wrong person.

Beli has experienced the violence when she decided to love the gangster and when Abelard experiences it when he protected his own daughter because of love. All these characters decisions are impacted some way towards violence and love.

Beli is an interesting character because she seems to have no compassion for Oscar’s weakness for woman, but she has the same weakness for men. Therefore, the relationship with the gangster and Beli represents that, because the gangster constantly told her lies about himself causing Beli to fall in love with him.

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Since Beli fell in love with the gangster, she starts to see the effects when she went to the car dealership and it ended in violence. The gangster shows her that he truly does not love her when he decided to leave Beli on their vacation. Beli is now involved in violence when la fea the gangster’s wife threatens to kill Beli making her terrified.

The quote, “she would realize how little respect Pujols had for her” shows how women are treated badly in this story. It shows this because they start by first having love for the character but end up showing some type of violence.

Now transitioning to violence, Abelard has been through a lot of violence when he went to prison and had been tortured there. Abelard also shows love to his daughter by not handing his daughter over to the dictator and decides to hide her. Hiding her daughter was a big price for Abelard because he was then sent to prison and tortured. Abelard only fights back because of the love towards his daughter. This represents that love is a strong emotion which can cause violence because of it. Abelard also shows love to Haitians because when Trujillo massacres them Abelard decides to patch them up and keep low. We see Abelard as a brilliant man who shows much love to his daughter and wants to avoid trouble, but the thing is Trujillo interfered. The author lets us know that it is hard to hide from the dictator.

Now let’s talk about Lola because she has dates cruel and worthless men all because of love. It starts off by Lola losing her virginity to a man named Aldo who has a cruel father. Later on, in the story Aldo’s father loves telling racist jokes. Then there is Yunior who decided to cheat on Lola and seems unfaithful about it. Lola’s weirdest relationship comes when she started dating the politician who was then a father of one of her classmates. She decides to sleep with him for $2000. But finally, Lola then marries Cuban Ruben and Yunior admitted that she seemed really happy. Altogether, Lola finally seemed like she broke the trend of not finding the right guy when she gets married. This sums up how love can change a person’s emotions because of the person they are with.

Lastly, talking about love Yunior comes to mind because he is the average ladies’ man in Dominican Republic. Sex is a must for Yunior because he believes that without it can’t be a relationship which is interesting. Also, Yuniors obsession with woman gets him in trouble from time to time which shows how a person’s emotion can change just because of love. Another point to make is that he decided to cheat on the only girl he ever loved Lola, which made him keep chasing him around for her love. Yunior also loves objectifying woman’s body parts a lot which show how much he loves woman. Yunior is the typical product of the Dominican Republic culture which all about sex.

All these characters have one thing in common, they all showed some form of either love or violence. Love is inherently linked with violence a lot in this story, and also compares to a disease which none of these characters could have recover from. So, the novel has a proclaimed curse on the Cabral de León family, this cure is showed by violence. But at the same time the main focus of this novel was love. Abelard has love for his family, while Belicia has three heartbreaks, and Yunior’s crazy love for Lola. All these things come down to one thing which is the curse on the Cabral de León family. So it shows that love and violence just reveals the curse on that family.