. Most critics agree that the voice of Yunior, the primary narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is very important in the novel. They have debated whether Yunior’s voice is a mode of freedom set against dictatorship, a source of seduction into a novel that carries homophobia and the objectification of women, or an example of the way that narrator’s voices in novels carry authority or control that is both like and unlike the voice of a dictator. Choose three or four passages where you find tensions between freedom and power or control in Yunior’s voice. Use no more than one passage that we discussed in class. How does each passage work with the tensions between freedom and power? Be sure to define what you mean by freedom and by power and to consider whose freedom and/or power is at stake? What do you think is the primary role of Yunior’s voice? How is it related to the other issues raised above?
Use the sub-questions I ask or sub-questions of your own to help you develop your thesis through smaller ideas that support it. Quote or cite passages from the text on which you are writing to illustrate your ideas.
Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker. New York: Vintage, 2005. ISBN: 978-1400034291.
Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead-Penguin, 2008.
ISBN: 978-1594483295.
