Revised Draft

In Junot Diaz’s memoir, “Drown,” the narrator finds himself looking back on his life in which the author shares his experience growing up in a poor Third World country, the Dominican Republic, divulges details of his personal life marked by years of neglect and deprivation at the hands of his father, or 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, Diaz’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 they are a norm rather than extraordinary circumstances that must be abolished.  However, despite the disconnection between the world I live in and the world Diaz describes, the author masterly crafts such an honest reality in his stories that the reader is able to justify, connect, and share the feelings of his characters.  Diaz’s writing style enables him to convey his characters’ inner drama to the reader, making the reader an integral part of the world his 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” (qtd. in J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms, page 647).  Likewise, Junot Diaz develops his stories through the use of dialogues, illustrations of scenery elements, and detailed depictions of events that uncover emotional stances of his characters, allowing his audience to connect to the character.  Rather than driving the reader’s reaction on a character’s mind or actions through depicting the way the individuals interact with each other, Diaz opens them up through connecting their moods or feelings with the reader’s.  Thus, conveying his characters’ true-life experience through communicating their inner state, Diaz manages to build a close association between his characters and the reader, relating them emotionally so as to enable the reader to feel what they feel.

Through dialogues, Diaz reveals a variety of facts that describe origin, cultural and social environments, as well as the professional standing of his characters.  In particular, Diaz 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 Diaz’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 English countryside.  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, not American, community, and allowing us to feel this segregation.  While such a tight bond does help the immigrants to retain their Dominican heritage, it stops them from exploring the new country and new possibilities.  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 Diaz writes about.  Furthermore, to re-create the society's social and cultural settings in which Diaz’s characters live, 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” (Diaz, 47 & 143). 

Diaz uses details to convey the family’s disadvantageous socio-economic situation through making the reader visualize how the most basic human needs for survival are not met.  For instance, the author indicates that the family has a limited or no access to fresh water.  Diaz helps his reader to relate the quality of the avaliable water further by indicating that “there were always leaves and spiders in the water but Mami could draw a clean bucket better than anyone” (Diaz, 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…” (Diaz, 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 future could be when the value of a pencil displaces kids from school to the streets.  

Through many related hints, Diaz 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, disturbing their 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 is willing to acknowledge.  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 state is further troubled by the fact that he became 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 relationships.

Diaz draws his characters through symbolic, distinguishing, but factual characteristics that allow the readers to associate themselves with.  He uses various literary techniques, such as the characters’ language expressions and their physical and emotional conditions, to make the characters’ inner state tangible and, thus, accessible to the reader.  Connecting the audience to the characters using such methods allow the author to evoke emotions directly from us that are similar to those of the characters’.  Apparently, such a reader-character correlation dissolves the fictional side of the character and replaces it with a real life experience, and hence, lets us live through the story.