Drown

Drown, by Junot Diaz, is a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories that explores the experience of Yunior, the Dominican narrator, as he and his family try to start a new life in the United States. Both the setting and time period of the book are not directly stated in most of the stories and often times they jump vastly between each story. However, in the end the stories all connect and support the author’s intent: to give insight into the lives of immigrants and to show how their passion and culture play a role in their immersion into American society.

The range of emotions experienced in the book is wonderful and terrible at the same time. Diaz uses short, graphic, blunt, and even Hemingway-esque sentences to allow the reader to experience the raw emotion of the events in the book. He combines this with a more refined and elaborate sentence structure, and in tandem they serve to keep the reader interested and on edge. This sentence structure helps the reader experience the emotions of the characters, for example on page 52 Yunior states about Aurora and him; “We hurt each other too well to let it drop. She breaks everything I own, yells at me like it might change something, tries to slam doors on my fingers.” And despite these hateful actions, “She picks off my glasses and kisses the parts of my face that never get touched, the skin under the glass and frame.” Through his sentence structure Diaz can communicate emotions that otherwise would not be as easily accessed. On occasion Diaz uses Spanish in his writing, using the Spanish word instead of the English one, to show how the characters have to skirt the line between the two cultures they are immersed in. This also gives the characters a unique voice and helps show changes in their personality. For example, in the first chapter of the book Yunior uses words such as “campesino” (8), “ponchera” (9), and “colmado” (19) simply to describe his environment, whereas later in the book , when he is older and involved with the wrong crowd he uses derogatory words such as “coño” (62) and “pato” (55). By the end of the book he has a job building and delivering pool tables and by then his use of Spanish is few and far between, perhaps signifying his complete immersion into American society. Diaz uses the story order and structure to reveal certain characters and events when he wishes, revisiting some aspects which he failed to describe in complete detail. Yunior’s father, Ramon, is painted to be an abusive father and unfaithful husband in the beginning of the book but by the end we learn of the hardship he had to go through to bring his family to the United States, which redeems his other character flaws.

The sentence structure, language, and order of the stories in Drown all play into Diaz’s overall intent.