Character Analysis: This Is How You Lose Her By Junot Diaz

No one lives alone in the world. From the beginning of life, we have someone around us. Watching and talking with our surroundings, we learn many important life lessons. Depending on the people who are around us, we will grow up differently because we interact each other and influence one’s personality. The Pulitzer Prize – winning author Junot Diaz depicts the pattern of human involvement in them in his novel, “This Is How You Lose Her”, shows the readers specific examples of their relationships. The main character and narrator Yunior struggles having a good relationship with women. This is a very first sentence in the novel; “I am not a bad guy” (Diaz 4). Diaz claims men’s perspective through his character, Yunior. Then he defends his attitude and claims that he did not mean it, but each time he hurts women’s feeling and himself. Although a love affair easily gets the reader’s attention, Diaz through his imperfect characters and symbols splendidly illustrates the relationships around Yunior that shows the process of his growth of a human being from child into adolescent. Diaz depicts a relationship between Yunior and his father by using

Yunior is jealous by saying “My brother was backing to be Number One Son; in all other things he was generally unchanged, but when it came to my father he obeyed him with a scrupulousness he never shown anybody” (Diaz 140). Provably, Rafa respects his father and follows his father’s ways. Ironically, this close relationship turns into bad influence. Rafa has his father’s dark side because he grows up exactly like his father. Yunior asserts; “father used to take you on his pussy runs, leave you in the car while he run up into cribs to bone his girlfriends” (Diaz 165). When Rafa becomes a teenager, he uses Yunior like a watch dog while he sleeps with a woman in a basement. This cheating habit affect a relationship between Yunior’s