Rough Draft (5/26)

            When I first tried writing in the same way that Junot Díaz did it in his short story collection Drown, my writing made no sense. Like Drown, my story featured multiple skips in time, and it also withheld information similarly to what Díaz did. It was confusing and hard to read. And yet, when reading the stories in Drown, it did make sense to me. In fact, I felt a strange sense of intimacy with the author. This seems strange because doing that should give the reader the opposite feeling, being distant from the author and not being able to understand the story. This leads me to ask the question: If Díaz’s stories make the reader feel close to him, but what he does seems like it should confuse the reader instead, then how does he make the story make sense and give it that intimate feeling?

            One way to explore why we get to feel close with Díaz despite it seeming like we should just be confused is to examine when he does something that should make us confused, like skipping in time or leaving out vital information. How the story makes the reader feel close with Díaz, I’ve found, happens as a result of how Díaz makes the stories feel informal and dialogical. Díaz skipping back and forth in time during Fiesta, 1980, moving around in time during Drown, and him not giving the names of the narrators in most of the stories all point to Díaz giving an informal and conversational experience in the stories of Drown.

            One of the ways Díaz does this is connecting moments with common threads. He does this throughout the story, but it is especially noticeable when he is jumping in time. One prevalent example of this is the car. It appears in multiple but similar forms, a car or a van or even a bus, but they are all tied together and seem to be related to traumatic events in the life of the main narrator, Yunior. This pops up in Ysrael we see Yunior get molested by a “low-down pinga-sucking pato”, while he is in a bus (Díaz 12). It appears again when Yunior starts to get sick whenever he gets sick in his father’s van and then gets punished for it during Fiesta, 1980 (Díaz 29-30). Yet another time it appears, in the story Drown, when Yunior and his friend get caught stealing from the store for the first time and he hides “under a Jeep Cherokee”, where he starts crying in fear (Díaz 98-99). This recurring theme of bad moments and cars not only connects the stories to help them make sense, but they help give a sense of it being a conversation, Díaz is just telling you about the things that happened to him involving cars.

            Another thing Díaz does to further advance the feeling of conversation and informality while he time jumps is have time continue on while he has flashbacks. One example of this is during Drown when Yunior is going to the pool and he recounts memories of his times with his old friend Beto. It starts off in the present when Yunior goes to “swing through the neighborhood”, then moves into flashbacks of what they did together, then suddenly it’s “I pass his apartment” and things are in the present (Díaz 91-92). Another time this happens is during Fiesta, 1980 when he recounts the first time he threw up in his Papi’s car. In this moment he is in a car getting ready to throw up when he remembers the first time he got sick in Papi’s van, and when that flashback is done time has continued on to how “[t]his time the damage was pretty minimal” (Díaz 29). The way Díaz has time continue on makes the story feel informal, as if he’s not writing it down in a book that will be published, he’s just telling a friend and it doesn’t matter if he misses a part, he’s just recounting the way he thought. This formality in turn makes the reader feel intimate with Díaz, as if they are close buddies.

            This informality is compounded when Díaz doesn’t give elements that seem to be key in understanding the story. One example of this is as simple as the narrator’s real name, as Yunior is just a nickname. His name is never explicitly stated, it seems like he might even be purposefully avoiding telling us. That bomb is finally dropped on the reader when Yunior’s Mami calls Papi by his real name, Ramón, in Fiesta, 1980 (Díaz 26). Even then it is so easy to miss, but it is possible to figure out because Yunior is just a pronunciation of Junior, as in he has the same name as his father, so therefore his name is Ramón too. The way it is revealed shows how unimportant Díaz views that information. After all, if you know him well, you don’t need to be told his name, right? Díaz assumes such basic knowledge of the story from the reader because if you and he are truly close then you understand the basic surroundings of the story.

            One more thing that Díaz does that increases the feeling of intimacy with the reader is how he deals with emotions of the narrator. Díaz tends to leave them out of the equation for descriptions of the narrator, which seems a bit weird, detached and confusing. However, these emotions come instead in the form of indirect feeling based on everything else going on. One example of this is when Yunior dives into the pool during the story Drown. With phrases like “I glide over the slick-tiled bottom without kicking up a spume or making a splash” and ”everything below is whispers” Díaz manages to give the feeling of calmness and relaxation without actually telling readers that is what Yunior is feeling (93). The way the narrator gives us his innermost feelings, which we can then interpret into emotions, shows an intimacy between reader and author.

            Throughout the story, Díaz goes far past simply having the story make sense, despite the way the story is set up non-chronologically and leaves out much important knowledge about the setting. He goes past having the reader know what is happening, into having the reader know what he is feeling, what he is thinking, and it brings reader closer to teller, with the intimate relationship of friends. Junot Díaz seems to be not just writing to strangers across the world, not even telling the story to you, but telling the story with you, as a friend in a friendly conversation. In Drown, Díaz destroys the barrier between you and him and you know him better as a result.