On Oscar's Cultural Identity In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

Junot Daz is a distinguished Dominican American writer who is a heavyweight figure in American contemporary immigration literature.His first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao received the Pulitzer Prize in the same year of its publication and won the National Book Critics' Best Novel Award in 2007.This novel,set in the background of Trujillo's regime in the Dominican Republic,mainly manifests the diasporic life of the de Leon family in the United States,especially their cultural predicament and identity confusion.This thesis takes the protagonist Oscar's cultural identity as the research object,tries to reveal the manifestation and roots of his identity crisis,analyzes his continuous attempts in the process of constructing cultural identity,and discusses his ultimate understanding and construction of hybrid identity.The main body of this thesis is composed of three parts.The first part studies Oscar's performance of cultural identity crisis and the hidden causes behind it.Oscar as a second-generation immigrant,whether it is in the diaspora community of colored people or in the school,whether it is his own family relation or friendship,has always been on the periphery of American and Dominican culture,thus creating his cultural identity crisis.The root of this cultural crisis is the forced emigration of his mother under Trujillo's dictatorship,and the power behind Trujillo's regime is European colonization,which indirectly lead to the cultural dilemma of Oscar.The second part mainly analyzes Oscar's efforts to construct his own cultural identity.Oscar attempts to construct his American cultural identity by accepting American pop culture.However,due to the racial differences and cultural conflicts,his efforts eventually end in failure.Stuck in the identity dilemma,he returns to his own national culture to seek for identification.In this process,he gets a new understanding of his ethnic culture and begins to actively integrate into Dominican culture.The third part discusses the process of Oscar's identity construction in detail.After having a correct cognition of his ethnic culture,Oscar works hard to build his cultural identity in Dominica.He changes his attitude towards his national culture and the history,embracing cultural differences in order to construct a new hybrid cultural identity.From the perspective of cultural identity,this article studies the process of Oscar's identity construction in detail.To get rid of cultural dfficulties and identity confusion,Oscar has made unremitting efforts and even paid the price of life.His diaspora experience reveals the plight of immigrants from ethnic minorities.The frustration he encounters in the process of cultural identification and the epiphany he gains also demonstrate the thinking of the author and other immigrants,proving a possibility for other immigrants who have the same identity confusion.This novel is intended to reveal the dilemma of the diaspora,and it is of great significance for other immigrants to construct their own cultural identities.