Radical Revisions

Pre-Workshop Peer Review: Isabel

1) The center of gravity seems to be the narration style. Specifically, how small seemingly random things appear in the story and how Díaz describes things through these small bits of information. Pretty much every point seems to lead back to how he uses small details to portray the story a certain way. You also seem to be saying that this is in place of just regular plain words to describe things.

2) I want to know more about what exactly does the reader get from Díaz doing this. You start to mention it at the end but you should expand on how the seemingly unimportant ideas actually end up defining Yunior as a character.

Pre-Workshop Peer Review: Gabriel

1) The center of gravity seems to be about how Díaz is portraying young Dominican men and their lives. Specifically, stereotypes that he portrays in the stories, and justifications for possible poor behaviors. Those are the big points you have, and you seem to be trying to say that that is what he is doing. I can tell you also use examples from the stories which show those, and everything revolves around that.

2) I want to know more about how exactly this relates to Díaz’s style and how he writes. How is what he is doing help others going through similar struggles, and how is this a style he uses? Also, the last paragraph seems really different and I want to know how it connects to the rest of it, it doesn’t connect at all right now.

Pre-Workshop Self-Reflection

1) The points I have seems to connect fairly well.
2) I have no real evidence or analysis.
3) It's like a Krabby Patty - it seems pretty good, but nobody actually knows the secret formula.

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.

Center of Gravity

Text Exploration 2

Decided I should do another one