Latest Draft 5/26

2nd Draft 5/25 Cale Houghton

IDK intro yet. What I need to know is how do I lead my reader to the claim?

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

He does this by confusing the reader with a lack of information.

One way Diaz does this is by making the character’s names very difficult to find. We don’t find Junior’s real name until the second story, where we hear it from his mom calling his dad Ramon (Diaz 26). From this, we are expected to deduce that because Junior takes his name from his father, his name must also be Ramon. So Diaz really makes you pay attention if you want to know the name. Also, Lucero’s name is never directly told to the reader. It is just used to label a paragraph relating to his name, so it is difficult to tell what it is. A character’s name is their label, an essential piece of information for keeping them straight. Yet Diaz withholds this, so to the reader the characters become one confusing jumble without characterization.

Diaz also doesn’t tell us who the narrator is. We don’t know who the narrator is because he speaks in the first person for every story, even though the stories jump from main character to main character.

What this mirrors is how the characters have confusing relationships with the people around them.

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, which is why it is so confusing that she doesn’t tell him.

Junior has a confusing relationship with Beto. He has an extremely intimate relationship with Beto in that they are best friends, and have had sexual relations. This is complicated by the fact that he calls gay people “fag” and “pato” after he has these sexual encounters (Diaz 103). And immediately after the second encounter, he compares his mood to “junk against the shore” (Diaz 105). So he obviously has something against being homosexual, which is confusing because he has had homosexual experiences himself.

Ramon Senior has a confusing relationship with Junior’s mother. We can see that she neither trusts him, or likes the way he treats her family. We know that she doesn’t trust him because in the Dominican Republic, she used to catch him cheating, and kick him out of the house (Diaz 163). Of course you wouldn’t fully trust someone who had cheated on you at least once. We know she doesn’t like the way he treats her family, because she unsuccessfully tries to stand up for Junior, by saying things like “Ya, Ramon, Ya. It’s not his fault” (Diaz 26). But in the end she comes back to him which is confusing. She agrees to move to New York, even after she finds out he lied to her and took her father’s money.

Diaz does this by putting the reader in a position where they feel like they shouldn’t be.

One way he does this is by letting us into his characters drug problems when we barely know them. He starts Aurora by saying, “Earlier today me and Cut drove to South River and bought some more smoke” (Diaz 47). Later in Aurora he gives us information that his girlfriend is in withdrawal (Diaz 49). In Drown he tells us that two kids see him, “recognizing the guy that sells them their shitty dope” (Diaz 93). It feels like we shouldn’t be here because selling drugs is illegal, and looked down upon by some in our society, because it is said to ruin lives. So by knowing that these characters sell drugs, the reader gets put in this position where they have to make the decision if these characters are bad people, which puts the reader in an uncomfortable and awkward position.

Another way he does this is by putting us right in the middle of his characters family problems. During the first story, he mentions that Junior’s father has been missing from his life, but Junior still believes that his dad will come back. I didn’t feel like this was information I should know, because I am not part of their family, and at this point in the story, I barely knew their family. So it seems like I am intruding into their business. The same is true when Junior mentions how his father abuses him (Diaz 30). Junior is admitting to a major fault in his family, and after this, I kind of judged them by this, which makes me think I shouldn’t have been told this.

What this mirrors is how his characters get forced into positions where they are let into secrets that they shouldn’t know.

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 Junior 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. 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.

Diaz does this by putting the reader through very sharp changes in what they read.

We can see this in the sudden change in main characters.

What this mirrors is how the characters have very sudden changes in their lives.

One of these sudden changes happens to Junior when he has to move to New York.

[Just thought of this idea and I need to explore it a bit more in my notebook].

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.