The Desiring Subject In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is regarded as a great success of the Dominican-American writer,Junot Diaz.Taking the colonial aggression and the displaced immigration life as the background,the novel shows the tragedy of Dominica and the saga of Oscar's family under the brutal domination.The tragedy of the country and individual derives from their own desires and the irreconcilable conflict among the desires.This thesis aims to analyze the tragedy of Oscar's family from the aspect of psychoanalysis.The individual,represented by Oscar Wao,is raised by a single mom,which causes the primordial lack.Desiring subject is established on lack and deficiency.The ideal image of subject is formed in the mirror stage which cannot be achieved.The unreachable of the ideal image means the insatiable of the object for desire.Oscar Wao and his family members are alienated and split during the desiring subject wandering around passive narcissistic desire and active anaclitic desire.The alienated subject attempts to go back to Real Order,but in the process of pursuing “real”,the arbitrary dictation of Trujillo acts as the Other who is gazing at and castrating the desire subject,then the original need is barred.Trujillo's tyranny forces the desiring subjects truckle to the Symbolic Order,so the desire of the subject becomes the desire of “the other”.The “Fuku” throughout the novel is the big desiring subject which restricts everyone under the illegal “law”;personal desires of Oscar Wao and his family members in the novel transfer to the attempts to resist the country violence and to fulfill the ideal ego in the mirror.Under such conflicts between desires,the protagonist insists to pursue the true love;their persistence to struggle with hegemonic governance is the endeavor to resist alienation in the alienated world.