Escape! The cultural and familial experience in Drown and The House on Mango Street

The short story cycle is a style of writing and an organizational tool authors use to focus attention on the themes that enhance both their overall intent and their story telling ability. The short story cycle, unlike the novel, is linked through its themes and setting, rather than its characters and plot. This gives authors the ability to manipulate the plot of their stories in order to highlight certain events or characters, and in the end give the reader an insightful and even enlightening experience. In Drown, by Junot Diaz, and The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, it is interesting to note the similarities and differences between the way they use story order, language, and sentence structure to illustrate how the cultural and familial experiences of Yunior’s and Esperanza’s childhood shaped their attitude and life. In either case the epitaph at the beginning of Drown is an excellent precursor to understanding the experiences of the Yunior and Esperanza. It reads as follows: “The fact that I am writing in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.”

In both Drown and The House on Mango Street the authors manipulate story order, and in turn the short story cycle, to present certain experiences and events in a manner from which the reader can better understand the reasons behind the attitudes of the main characters, Yunior and Esperanza. In Drown, Diaz presents the stories in non-chronological order, which requires the reader to piece together Yunior’s experiences in order to perceive his overall attitude on life. Diaz uses the stories “Aguantando” and “Fiesta, 1980” to develop the story of Yunior’s childhood and how his experiences in the Dominican Republic and later in New Jersey affected his development into a young adult. “Aguantando” focuses on Yunior’s experiences in the Dominican Republic and how living “without a father for the first nine years of [his] life” (69) affected him. He yearned to know who this mysterious man, Ramon, was and asked “to see his picture almost every day.” (83) When his mother refused to show him the photo Yunior would “[throw] [him]self about like [he] was on fire.” (83) Family was obviously very important to Yunior, and he even says that he “never wanted to be away from the family.” (75) However, in “Fiesta, 1980,” Yunior’s attitude about his family was completely opposite, as he says, “I never wanted to go anywhere with the family.” (24) In this story we also learn the cause of this ying-yang in attitude; his father’s violent tendencies and his father’s relationship with Yunior’s mother. When Ramon finds out that Yunior, who suffers from carsickness, ate dinner before a road trip, he calls him “Cono” (25), a vulgar word in Spanish, and “pulled him to [his] feet by [his] ear” (26) to scold him. Yunior begins to “[cry], tears in [his] eyes, more out of reflex than pain.” (26) The fact that Diaz uses the word “reflex” to describe Yunior’s response to his father’s violence implies that the situation was commonplace. The relationship between Yunior’s parents seems nonexistent, as his father “pushed past [his mother], held up his hand when she tried to talk to him and headed right to the shower,” (23) when he got home from work. His mother is described as “anxious, in her usual dispassionate way,” (24) as she waits for Ramon to get out of the shower. Diaz places the story “Fiesta, 1980” in the short story cycle before “Aguantando,” to show the disparity between Yunior’s two attitudes on family, and to clearly state the cause, his father’s abuse and indifference towards his family. Diaz uses the stories “Aurora,” “Drown,” “Boyfriend,” and “Edison, New Jersey” to show the fact that Yunior is not able to escape the effects his childhood had on him. In “Aurora” Yunior is a drug dealer with his brother, who he now refers to as Cut, and has an abusive, failing relationship with a juvenile delinquent. In “Edison, New Jersey” Yunior tells two stories, his job as a pool and card table deliveryman, and the story of his relationship with his ex-girlfriend. At the end of the story we learn about the way Yunior guesses the location of the first delivery for the next morning by “clos[ing] [his] eyes and put[ting] [his] hand on the map.” (139) This is meant to be a metaphor to the fact that Yunior has no guidance or direction in his life. Overall, the story order in Drown serves the purpose of showing the affects Yunior’s childhood had on his life. In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros uses a chronological story order to track the development of Esperanza, revealing things about her as the stories progress. The early stories focus on Esperanza’s reaction to her new home on Mango Street; how it is “small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they’re holding their breath,” (4) and that “the house on Mango Street isn’t” a house she “could point to.” (5) She feels as though she does not belong on Mango Street. In the story “Boys and Girls” Esperanza claims that “someday I will have a best friend of my own,” (9) showing her desire to be accepted. Later in the book, in the story “Our Good Day,” Esperanza meets and befriends “Rachel” and “Lucy.” (15) The next few stories chronicle their childish adventures together; for example, “the First Annual Tarzan Jumping Contest,” (22) off of a tree. However, towards the middle of the book the topics get more serious. In the story “The Family of Little Feet,” Rachel, Lucy, and Esperanza are given “one pair of lemon shoes and one red and one pair of dancing shoes that used to be white but were now pale blue,” (40) which they “trade..and take off and put on again.” (40) They walk through their neighborhood and get reactions from nearly everyone, most notably from a homeless man sitting on a stoop: “Your little lemon shoes are so beautiful…Rachel, you are prettier than a yellow taxicab.” (41) The story lets us know that Esperanza is at the age where her sexuality is presenting itself, but she decides she is “tired of being beautiful,” (42) so she gets rid of the heels. The theme of loss of innocence resonates through the next few stories until it reaches its climax in the story “Red Clowns,” where Esperanza is raped by “the one who grabbed me by the arm, he wouldn’t let me go,” (100) saying, “I couldn’t make them go away…I don’t remember. Please don’t make me tell it all.” (100) The book ends on a hopeful note, unlike Drown, as Esperanza says, “One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away.” (110) This leaves the reader with the image of Esperanza packing her things and finding escape from the place which she never considered her home.

Language plays a large part in both Drown and The House on Mango Street; however the way it is presented in each book is very different. In Drown, Junot Diaz utilizes the actual Spanish language directly in his text which gives the characters a unique voice and connects the characters to their culture. The Spanish words are meant to flow and come naturally within the text, as they are simply placed in the sentences without drawing attention to them using italics. For example, “All her neighbors were administrators and hombres de negocios and you had to walk three blocks to find any sort of colmado. It was that sort of neighborhood.” (75) When viewing the prevalence of Spanish in the text it becomes apparent that it serves to parallel Yunior’s cultural experience; that is, the stories which take place when Yunior is a young boy use Spanish quite prolifically, however as he matures and becomes more immersed into American society the use of Spanish in the text diminishes. For example, in the story Ysrael, when Yunior is nine, he uses words such as “colmado,” (3) “campo,” (3) and “barrio” (4) to describe Santo Domingo, his hometown, and throughout the story Spanish appears on every page. Later in the book, though, for example in the story Drown, when Yunior is in high school, Spanish appears only sporadically. Yunior appears to grow out of his native culture, avoiding it because he has experienced its affects on his family; how it pulled them apart, brought them together, and pulled them apart again like a game of tug of war. In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros does not use the Spanish language directly, as Diaz does in Drown; however language still plays a large role in Esperanza’s cultural experience. The book is littered with Spanish words here and there, and unlike Drown they are all italicized. The italics serve to distinguish the two languages, which makes the Spanish disparate from the English in the book, foreign even. This disparity can be seen in the book when viewing the prevalence of Mexican culture and the perception of the Spanish language. The barrio which Esperanza lives in is “All brown all around,” (28) meaning that only Mexican people such as Esperanza and her family live there. Esperanza talks about how “Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous.” (28) These descriptions reveal the fact that the neighborhood itself is separate from the rest of American society; it is in fact an island of Mexican culture. Esperanza, unlike Yunior, makes a conscience effort to escape this culture because she sees it as entrapping. For example, when her mother writes a note to Sister Superior asking her to “Please let Esperanza to eat in the lunchroom,” (45) the nun does not even take the letter seriously because it is so poorly written. Also, in the story titled “No Speak English” the reader learns of the woman named Mamacita who does not speak any English except for a few phrases and who traps herself in her home “because she is afraid to speak English.” (77) These themes of entrapment lead Esperanza, whose name means hope in English, to seek escape from her current location as well as her culture. In both Drown and The House on Mango Street the use of language shows the characters’ desires to escape their culture and the affect the culture had on their lives.

The sentence structure in both Drown and The House on Mango Street serve to help the reader experience the emotion in the books, which in turn helps the reader understand the important events and their impact on the characters. In Drown, Diaz uses short, graphic, blunt, Hemingway-esque phrases in combination with more refined and elaborate phrases to form the structure of his sentences. This structure facilitates the recognition of significant events. For example, in the story “Aguantando,” Yunior says the following about his father’s (Ramon) absence during his childhood, “He was the soldier in the photo. He was a cloud of cigar smoke, the traces of which could still be found on the uniforms he’d left behind. He was pieces of my friends’ fathers, of the domino players on the corner, pieces of Mami and Abuelo. I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t know he abandoned us. That this waiting was all a sham.” (70) Diaz carefully juxtaposes the two sentence structures to draw attention to the fact Yunior had no idea who his father was, except for the man in the photo. The fact that his father was absent during his childhood helped form Yunior’s relationship with his father later in life. Later, when Yunior talks about the car rides he and his father used to take to cure him of his carsickness, this same sentence structure can be seen: “They were the only times me and Papi did anything together. When we were alone he treated me much better, like maybe I was his son or something.” (35) Ramon not only did not spend time with his son, he was a terrible role model for him. He even went as far as taking Yunior to his mistress’ house for dinner. He compares the affair to “a hole in our living room floor, one we’d gotten so used to circumnavigating that we sometimes forgot it was there.” (40) The effect Ramon had on his life becomes evident when viewing Yunior’s relationships with women. In the story “Aurora” he describes the relationship he has with his on again off again girlfriend, Aurora. In the section titled “ONE OF OUR NIGHTS,” implying the everyday nature of the description, Yunior says, “We hurt each other too well to let it drop. She breaks everything I own, yells at me like it might change something… When she wants me to promise her a love that’s never been seen anywhere I think about the other girls.” (52) From the way Diaz sculpts his sentences it becomes apparent that Yunior is unable to have a normal relationship with his girlfriend, and even describes the loud argument his neighbors are having as “sweet talk” and that “They’re yelling because they’re in love.” (52) Diaz uses contrasting sentence structure to aid the reader in discerning the important events which play into Yunior’s life and attitude. In The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, a similar style is used to inject emotion into the text. Cisneros uses poetic, descriptive, matter of fact sentences in the same manner Diaz used his sentence structure; that is to allow to reader to understand the important events and their impact on the characters. It is necessary then, in order to understand the cultural experience of Esperanza, to highlight the instances when Cisneros uses her sentence style to point out certain events. In the story “My Name” Esperanza discusses her name. On page 10 she talks about its meaning in English, “hope,” and its meaning in Spanish, “sadness…waiting…the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.” She talks about how she inherited her name from her great-grandmother, but how she does not want to inherit “her [great-grandmother’s] place at the window” where she “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on their elbow.” She eventually comes to the conclusion that she wants to “baptize [her]self under a new name, a name more like the real [her]…Something like Zeze the X.” It is obvious that Esperanza has no ties to her Mexican culture, and that she seeks to escape it. This theme of escape becomes more obvious in the story titled “Born Bad.” Esperanza reads to her Aunt Lupe a poem she wrote. It goes as follows: “I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I’m me. One day I’ll jump out of my skin. I’ll shake the sky like a hundred violins.” (60) Cisneros uses literal poetry this time to express Esperanza’s desire to “jump out of her own skin” and become free. In both Drown and The House on Mango Street the use of sentence structure highlights the events which influenced the lives of Yunior and Esperanza.