Response to Drown

After reading the first section from Junot Diaz’s novel Drown, I feel like I have more of an understanding as to how it must’ve been like to live in the slums of the Dominican Republic without a father, and also what it must’ve been like to find racism in the United States (mainly Miami and New York).

The way Diaz arranged each section in his short novel was a bit hard to follow—especially since he uses quite a bit of Spanish terms. If I were to read it again, however, I think that I would understand more of it. I liked how he told both sides of the story- Yunior’s as well as Papi’s. This gave insight into both character’s lives, which was intriguing.

Drown is without a doubt—like Another Country—for an adult, open-minded audience. The sexuality of the main character Yunior could be seen as offensive to others, mainly since he lets his friend, Beta, give him a few hand jobs, and Diaz also devotes a whole chapter about how to get with women of all ethnicities. I did not understand the whole fuss about the “government cheese” in this particular chapter. Yunior’s character tells the reader to hide this specific kind of cheese from all types of girls- brown, black, white, or halfie (143).

I was shocked to find that at age nine, Yunior did not know how to write his own name (82). Also, I found it very unexpected when his friend, Beta, touched his privates while they watched a porno in Beta’s basement.

I thought that the Ysrael section was very upsetting. I did not like how the narrator and his brother, Rafa, took advantage of this poor masked boy named Ysrael. Rafa attacks Ysrael and together, they flipped him on his back just so that they could get a look at this poor fellow’s appearance behind his mask. Ysrael’s face was eaten by a pig when he was a baby, and the two other boys knew this, but it did not stop them from attacking this poor boy. Diaz’s description of Ysrael’s face was rather graphic and disturbing to me.

In the Fiesta, 1980 section, I was upset by the way Yunior’s father treated him for throwing up in his father’s VW van. Also, I was surprised to find that his father took both Yunior and Rafa over to his Porto Rican girlfriend’s house. This was sad to me, and I sensed a lot of foreshadowing- that their father was going to leave their mother.

I haven’t heard that honey can cure sleepwalking. This was what girlfriend told Yunior after he told her that he sleepwalks. I wonder if this is true. If I had this problem, I would try it out.

It was upsetting in the No Face section when a guy asks Ysrael if he has started eating cats and his friend joins in, “He’ll be eating kids next” (155). I feel horrible for this character since it seems everyone—except for the priest—picks on him like crazy. Indeed, Ysrael’s only safety is found in the church. The fact that the boys who chased him to the church had the nerve to throw rocks at the church was shocking to me. Have they no respect for the church? Apparently they do not.

It surprised me to find that Nilda was aware of Papi’s familia in the Dominican Republic, but yet she still agreed to marry him, and they had a son and named it Ramon. Also, I thought it was very cruel of Papi to fight with his new wife Nilda because he thought she was getting obese (200). Personally, I think that Papi is a real coward in how he deals with his first family (by ignoring all of the letters at first, then sending them money as a means to make himself feel better about himself). Also, the way he sneaks his clothes out of Nilda’s house is just ridiculous. He doesn’t have the nerve to talk to her about moving out, so instead, he gradually sneaks his clothes out. Then, one morning he strokes her hair (something he never does) and she asks him if everything’s okay and he says it’s fine. Then Nilda fell back asleep only to wake up and find that her wayward husband abandoned her, just as he had abandoned his first family.

The last thing that surprised me was the fact that Yunior wanted to meet Nilda. Personally, I would think that it would be way too weird to go meet with the woman whom my father abandoned my family for.