Saturday, August 11, 2018

What is an example fromThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz that illustrates that Oscar has different interests than his peers?

When Oscar is a young boy, he has friends who are girls. The other boys find this suspicious and tease him about being gay. Oscar gradually withdraws into himself and gains a lot of weight; by the time he enters high school he is obese and has acne (“The Moronic Inferno” chapter). He understands that he is not attractive to girls and has no hope of getting a girlfriend. Junot Diaz summarizes the differences between this sci-fi loving "nerd" and other boys: his inability to play sports, lack of coordination, and the fact that he “threw a ball like a girl.” His shortcomings extended to music, dance, and rap, and he also has no talent for business. Even worse than that, he wore ugly glasses and basically had “no looks.” His interests were in reading, especially reading old-time fantasy and science fiction.

Oscar had always been a young nerd—the kind of kid who read Tom Swift, who loved comic books and Ultraman—but by high school, his commitment to the genres had become absolute. Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers’ cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents’ eyes, he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein . . .
https://books.google.com/books?id=hCb1HdxH_SAC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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