In Junot Díaz’s memoir, Drown, the narrator finds himself
looking back on his life in which the author shares his experience growing up in
a poor country, the Dominican Republic, divulges details of his personal life
marked by years of neglect and deprivation from his father, and tells about the
Latino immigrant community in the United States. For someone like myself, who was born and
raised in the United States by well-educated and successful parents, someone
who has never experienced any physical or emotional discomfort, someone who is
genuinely loved and carried about, and whose only troubling responsibility is
school work, Díaz’s book is a journey to an unknown world, the world of
poverty, family betrayals, traumatized friendships, and hopeless love affairs,
where characters deal with day-to-day violence and physical abuse as a norm
rather than extraordinary circumstances that must be abolished. However, despite the disconnect between the
world I live in and the world Díaz describes, the author masterly crafts such a
truthful reality in his stories that the reader is able to justify, connect,
and share the feelings of his characters.
Díaz’s writing style enables him to convey his characters’ inner drama
to the reader, making the reader anintegral part of the life the characters
experience.
T.S. Eliot, an American poet, who is also
well-known for his literary critic, claims that “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when
the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the
emotion is immediately evoked” (Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems” in The Sacred Wood). Likewise, Junot Díaz develops his stories
through the use of dialogues, illustrations of specific scenery elements, and
detailed depictions of events that uncover emotional stances of his characters,
allowing the audience to connect to each character. Rather than driving the reader’s reaction
from a character’s judgment or action, Díaz depicts the way the individuals
interact with each other and opens them up by connecting their mood or feelings
with the audience. Thus, conveying his
characters’ true-life experience through communicating their inner stance, Díaz
manages to build a close association between his characters and the reader,
connecting them emotionally so as to enable the reader to feel what the
personas feel.
Through dialogues, Díaz reveals a variety
of facts that describe the origin, the cultural environment, as well as the
social status of his characters. In
particular, Díaz uses Spanish words throughout his stories and dialogues,
transporting the reader into the Latino community, whether events take place in
the Dominican Republic or in New Jersey.
In Díaz’s first story, “Ysrael”,
his characters keep talking about the colmado,
a Spanish word for a grocery store, and the campo,
which stands for the countryside in English.
The narrator denotes his family members only by their Spanish
titles: Papi and Mami, Abuelo referring to grandpa, Tía – to aunt, and Tío – to uncle. Even when
they are in the United States, Yunior, the narrator, and his family continue to
speak Spanish to one another, highlighting their close ties to the Latino and
their lack of interest in the American community, reinforcing their status
quo. While such a tight cultural bond
does help the immigrants to retain their Dominican heritage, it may also
emphasize them as people of a habit who are not willing to explore other life
possibilities because they are comfortable with what they already have. In “Aurora,” the story that takes place in
New Jersey, many of the untranslated Spanish words are also accompanied by
African-American slang words, such as “bro,” to allow the reader to visualize
the ethnicity of the community that Díaz writes about. Furthermore, to establish the social and
cultural background of Díaz’s characters in their Dominican community, the
narrator’s speech is filled with disparaging Spanish words, such as pato, which is a degrading term for a
gay man and brutal English vocabulary, such as fuck, which is excessively misused throughout the dialogues.
The author also communicates the immigrant’s hassle with the English language
by adding humorous expressions into the narrator’s speech. His dialogues are packed with phrases such as
“Jewel luv it” to mimic the English
language phrase “You will love it” and slang combinations, such as “…even
though your moms knows you ain’t sick you stuck your story until finally she
said, Go ahead and stay, malcriado” (Díaz, 47 & 143).
Díaz uses a number of details to convey
the family’s disadvantageous socio-economic situation in their home country by
making the reader visualize how the most basic needs for human survival are not
met. For instance, the author indicates
that the family has a limited or no access to fresh water by letting us know
that the family collects rainwater for cleaning purposes. Díaz also helps the reader to relate the
quality of the rainwater further by indicating that “there were always leaves
and spiders in the water but Mami could draw a clean bucket better than anyone”
(Díaz, 71). Furthermore, Yunior and his
brother, Rafa, cannot afford losing the only pencil each of them has for
school. If they were to lose it,
“…[they] had to stay home from school until Mami could borrow another one…” (Díaz,
71). Such a harsh detail makes the
reader comprehend with the level of economic and social crisis of the entire
community. Apparently, there are no
spare pencils available in school or friends’ families that can be easily
accessed by the ones in need. This
single fact reveals how unpromising and diminishing the importance of someone’s
life could be when the value of a pencil displaces kids from school to the
streets.
Through many related hints, Díaz makes
the reader see a family tragedy, which evolves and spreads far beyond the
wrecked romantic relationship between the wife and the husband, Yunior’s
parents, traumatizing children and, subsequently, negatively affecting the
latters’ future relationships. Thus,
“Fiesta, 1980” story reveals Yunior’s uneasy take on Papi’s love affair with a
Puerto Rican woman. Yunior is
emotionally destroyed by his father’s betrayal, far more than he
acknowledges. The depth of his emotional
struggle, though, is reflected by his physical condition. He is unable to travel in his father’s car
without throwing up, as he associates the car with Papi’s mistress whom he met
“…right after Papi had gotten the van” (Diaz, 34). Yunior’s carsickness seems to be a reaction
to his father’s deed and his inability to accept his father’s
unfaithfulness. Yunior’s emotional stance
is troubled further by the fact that he is a part of his father’s lie but still
“…looked forward to [their] trips, even though at the end of each one [he]’d be
sick. These were the only times [he] and
Papi did anything together” (Diaz, 35).
Yunior’s inner conflict, which he did not overgrow successfully in his
adolescent years, later extends into a chain of hopeless and chaotic love
affairs.
Díaz draws his characters through
symbolic and distinguishing, yet factual characteristics that allow us to
relate to them. He uses various literary
techniques, such as providing the characters’ language expressions and their
physical and emotional conditions, to make the persona’s inner stance tangible
and, thus, more accessible to the reader.
Connecting the audience to the characters using such methods allows the
author to evoke emotions from the audience that are similar to those of the
characters’. Apparently, such a
reader-character correlation dissolves the fictional origin of the characters,
and blends them with the reader, allowing us to live through the story.
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