At first glance it might not appear that there is anything "magical" about Trujillo's oppressive reign over the Dominican Republic. The man brutally tortured and suppressed his objectors, never hesitating to beat or electrocute a person if he sensed a hint of disloyalty-This is not exactly the stuff of fairy tales! However, the fact that the Era of Trujillo was in Latin America means that it was only likely for this period of time to take on a surreal, almost mythological feel, for if Latin America could be assigned one genre that represents itself it would be magical realism. Since The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao takes its readers to a place and time that is not familiar to most, Junot Díaz takes us through this unfamiliar landscape using elements of magical realism to properly demonstrate just how unearthly it was to be under Trujillo's control. As the book progresses, sometimes it is hard to separate fact from fiction, and often times fact was stranger than fiction during this era.
Trujillo cultivated this fantastical era by becoming a supernatural force to many. His critics would disappear off the streets almost immediately after saying anything negative about the dictator. Trujillo's web of spies and informants ran deep, giving the public a sense that everything they said was being monitored and could get them arrested if they spoke out of line at any moment. Trujillo really did seem like he was everywhere at once and not just in the physical world as "it was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond" (3). This fukú will be the alleged cause of all of the younger narrators' misfortunes in the book even after Trujillo's reign ended. Those who were alive during the reign suffered from some of the cruelest torture practices ever invented. Trujillo seemed to have put a lot of imagination and creativity into how he would torture his opponents for some of their fates seem too grotesque for the average mind to even think of. Besides the beatings and electrocutions, the book mentions his personal dwarf that would bite off prisoners' testicles. This is astonishingly true by other accounts, the reality being too strange and horrible to make up unless you are Trujillo. His reign was so oppressive and cruel, Díaz found it necessary to convey its reality through magical realism to give a more complete sense of what this era was like.
In the novel Oscar also has his own fantastical view of what the Trujillo Era was like. Oscar is a massive fan of fantasy and science fiction novels as shown by Díaz's constant references to works such as Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes. Oscar is frequently depressed and unhappy with his life so he constantly retreats into these make-believe worlds to find solace. He is so engrossed by these novels that he tries to write his own fantasy saga set in the Dominican Republic. It is no coincidence that Oscar is an avid fantasy genre fan as he is a descendant from a Dominican Republic family that survived the era of Trujillo. He even believes his family is cursed by a fukú after all. So it is no surprise when Díaz uses Oscar to explain the era of Trujillo in terms of other works of fiction such as The Twilight Zone, saying living in this time period was a lot like "being in the famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world" (224). Oscar and the other narrators lived in an unfathomable yet real time, one that we are able to best imagine and relate to through magical realism and other works of fantasy.
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