Raw Draft

In Junot Díaz’s Drown he makes the story confusing and keeps it secretive by doing a few different things.

First of all, he skips around in time throughout his stories, from the highest level of writing to the lowest. The book, which is split up into ten chapters or stories, can be taken as Díaz telling the story of a fictional past not too dissimilar from his own. Then, each of these 10 stories happen at different times, and are not in chronological order at all. And then within each story Díaz skips around even more, often times with flashbacks, like in Fiesta 1980, where the narrator recalls when he first threw up in a car, or in Drown where the narrator remembers what he used to do with an old friend. Not being in chronological order should make the story hard to understand and read. However, Díaz makes it make sense anyway by doing two things. One, he connects the flashbacks and things that happened in different time frames with common threads. And two, Díaz has the time in the story continue on while the flashback occurs, which has the effect of making it seem like the narrator is just talking. This in turn causes it to make more sense than it initially appeared to. [Evidence here once I sort it out]

Another thing Díaz does to confuse the reader is he often withholds basic information about the story. The name of the narrator is never directly told in any story. In fact, it is never explicitly stated who is the narrator of each story or whether they were a narrator in another story or some other character already encountered. We are left to infer when each story occurred relative to the others. This can be really confusing, because it is hard to tell what is going on. However, Díaz actually gives us this emotional information indirectly. [Evidence]. We do find out what the emotions are, Díaz just hides them so they are just out of plain sight.

One more confusing thing Díaz does is not give the emotions of the narrator. Constantly we get him just talking about what actions he is taking, or what actions those around him are taking. If we are lucky we get a flashback that is, again, him just talking about actions. He gives no real emotion to us. This makes it seem very detached and confusing for the reader – What is he feeling? Emotion is an important part of any story and it feels empty without it. But when you look closer, he does give emotion, just indirectly. [Evidence]. This is another way it seems to be missing things and be confusing, but really, the story works. Throughout the whole book, Díaz seems to hide things that should make the story confusing, but in actuality is giving readers all the information they need.