5/21 Rough draft

Rough Draft 5/19 Cale Houghton

Stories are supposed to be geared towards the reader, and the narrator is supposed to walk the reader through the story.

But, when I was reading this story, the narrator did nothing to help me. I was confused on the chronology, the point of view, and the plot.

Junot Diaz’s style is to put the reader through the exact same experiences that the characters in his stories go through.

The confusion Junot Diaz puts the reader through is a reflection of the confusion his characters go through, because they don’t really know each other yet they still have close relationships.

Junior has a confusing relationship with his brother in that he never tells his brother about what he really feels, yet he still wants to be around his brother all time. After he gets molested by a man on the bus, Junior never even mentions this to his brother, even though his brother was on the bus to. He obviously doesn’t have an open relationship with Rafa if he can’t tell him this major thing that just happened. But then at the same time, he says “I always followed Rafa, trying to convince him to let me tag along,” (Diaz 6). If he follows Rafa around, it would seem that he has a close position to him, but he decides not to tell him about this traumatic event, which signals that he doesn’t actually connect with him that much.

Junior has a confusing relationship with his mother because he loves her and cares for her a lot, but still won’t share information with her. One way I know he loves her is that Junot Diaz dedicates this book to his mother, and it is suspected that this book is at least partly autobiographical. This shows that he wants to accomplish things for her, and that he cares for her. He also just says several times in the story that he loves her. [Needs evidence]. Yet at the same time, he says that because of issues with his father, they were, “no longer as close” (Diaz 84). Because they are described as not “close”, it seems like they wouldn’t know very much about each other.

Lucero has a confusing relationship with Aurora because he never knows anything about her or stays in touch with her, even though they are dating. For example, she comes to him in the middle of the night, and he doesn’t know where she has been. Even though she doesn’t tell him anything about it, he can see from looking at her that she is going through drug withdrawal, because she has “the shakes”. She doesn’t bring up that she is in withdrawal from drugs, which seems very deceitful to me. That seems like the sort of thing you would tell your significant other.

These are similar to how the reader gets left high and dry in terms of information. We didn’t know Juniors real name until part way through Fiesta 1980. Not knowing a characters name real name can be very disorienting. But more so than this, in the story Aurora, I thought it was Junior talking the whole time, which completely twisted the story from what it was. Throughout all these examples the characters have ongoing relationships with people around them, but there is still a lack of information shared between them. We read this book, so we had an ongoing relationship with it

The personal information that the narrator dumps on us is similar to how Junior gets stuck in the middle of these family secrets.

His father thrusts these secrets on him. Junior says, “I don’t remember being out of sorts after I met the Puerto Rican woman, but I must have been,” (Diaz 42). We know from later in the story that he really wants to tell his mother about this other woman. He longs for his mother to be able to expose his father, and he feels really bad for his mother, knowing everything she goes through just to be cheated on by his father. He Ramon Senior doesn’t even think of the things he is putting his son through when he tells him this secret. He just tells it to him, forcing it on him whether he likes it or not.

His brother forces him to keep his secrets. He says, “Rafa had me guarding the door. Him and Leti were in there,” (Diaz 40). So obviously he is using Junior here as a person to cover for him, and he does not care about what Junior wants. And this is not the only time his brother forces him in on his own sexual secrets. In the Dominican Republic he tells Junior about the girls he has had sex with. So Junior is put in the middle of this situation that he didn’t ask to be in at all by his brother, who doesn’t seem concerned about what he gets Junior into.

These examples are similar to how the reader is given very secretive information about the characters in the stories. One example of this is how in the story Ysrael, Junior just casually drops in that he was molested by a random man on the bus. He says, “he was pinching at the tip of my pinga through the fabric of my shorts,” (Diaz 12). This isn’t even the main point of the story. To me, this felt awkward, because it was like I was in on a secret that I shouldn’t be. Yet the story forces it on you, just like how Junior gets stuck with his family's secrets, even though he feels awkward with them.

In conclusion, Diaz tells the story in this confusing way to put the reader through the same feelings his characters go through. During an interview, Junot Diaz said that he meant this book as a kind of cultural mirror for, “people like him”. So maybe he is trying to convey that as a whole, “people like him” have a confusing experience, and that his reason for writing this is to convey that.