Oscar Wao Individualism

Man is always born free, yet as one grows up he or she may mold themselves to meet society's expectations. Freedom is truly being able to make a decision by oneself. If one lets society and other people control what he or she does, individuality will never be achieved. It is important for an individual to build up an identity for themselves even if it is not the norm in society. Ralph Waldo Emerson one of the most famous writers and Transcendentalists to ever live, advocated individualism. Individualism is the ideology that accentuates the moral worthiness of an individual, believing one can make his or her decisions by themselves without influences from other people or society. This basically means the truest freedom for one to achieve is
Oscar Wao believes he is such a lowly person: no friends, no life, and no freedom. Another thing that really bothers Oscar is that everyone around him is in a relationship and he is not, when he was small he used to be a very alpha male character someone that all the girls would like. He was known for his dating habits in the Dominican community and was very popular for it. But as he grew up he gained weight and wasn’t particularly attractive to anyone. Oscar had a challenging life throughout the story whether it was his alcohol addicted ruthless mother or his rebel sister. Oscar let the way people looked at him shape his future, which is a characteristic of an antithetical Emersonian
The leaders of the collective society he lives in named him a street sweeper since they believed he was not capable of doing anything else. A collective society operates in a completely different way than the way we live today. People that live in a collective society do everything for the good of the society rather than their self-interest. Self-interest does not exist in a society, where one is assigned a time to wake up, eat, shower, and sleep. The people living in this society have absolutely no freedom whatsoever. Citizens are forbidden to learn about or even speak of the unmentionable times, which was the past. This society is so group centered that every subject is required to speak of oneself using the word “we”. This whole novel revolves around self-actualization and the realization and meaning of the word “I”. There is indeed a difference between ego and