Rough Draft

In Junot Diaz’s memoir, “Drown,” the narrator finds himself looking back on his life whether the author shares his experience growing up in the Dominican Republic, reveals the hardships of being an immigrant in the United States, or describes the idea of the “American Dream.”   For someone like myself, who was born and raised in the United States by well-educated and successful parents, someone who 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, 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 builds such an honest reality that the reader is able to connect, accept, and share the feelings of his characters. Diaz’s writing style creates an intimate connection between his characters and the reader.

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 story through the use of dialogs, showings of scenery, and the depiction of events that reveal moods and emotional states of his characters, placing the reader right into the story’s setting.  Diaz helps readers to visualize his characters through communicating their mood and feelings to us.  Thus, through conveying details of his characters’ true-life experience, Diaz manages to build an inner association of his characters and the reader, relating them emotionally and evoking the reader to feel what the characters 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.  While such a tight bond does help the immigrants to retain their homeland heritage, it stops them from exploring the new nation and new possibilities.  In the “Aurora” story, that takes place in New Jersey, many of untranslated Spanish words are also accompanied with 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 community’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 clean fresh water.  Diaz helps his reader to relate the quality of such 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 one fact reveals how unpromising and diminishing the importance of someone’s future life could be when the value of a pencil displaces kids from school to the streets.  

Through many related nuances, Diaz makes the reader see a family tragedy, which evolves and spreads far beyond romantic relationships between the wife and the husband, Yunior’s parents, traumatizing children and affecting their future personalities.  Thus, “Fiesta, 1980” story reveals Yunior’s uneasy take on Papi’s love affair with a Puerto Rican woman.  Yunior is emotionally troubled by his father’s betrayal – far more than even he can acknowledge.  As the result, he is unable to travel in his father’s car without throwing up, as the car is associated with Papi’s mistress whom he met “…right after Papi had gotten the van” (Diaz, 34).  Yunior’s carsickness is the reaction to his father’s deed and his inability to accept his father’s unfaithfulness.   Yunior’s emotional state is troubled further by the fact that he got involved in 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).  Ultimately, one can argue that Yunior’s experience with his father’s betrayals in his adolescent years have led to a chain of hopeless relationships for himself.

The development of Diaz’s characters is supported by detailed representations of their language and physical and emotional conditions.  The characters’ inner conflicts, their emotional transformations, and reactions are communicated to the reader in the way that it lets the reader become an integral part of the characters’ life experience.  Such a correlation allows the reader to understand and share feelings of Diaz’s characters.