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Summary Of Drown By Junot Diaz

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“Drown” by Junot Diaz is a 1996 novel that has a collection of short stories regarding the life of Latin Americans in the United States of America. “Fiesta” is a story that focuses on the family members at a small apartment in Bronx, New York. The main character in the story is Yunior, a young boy who struggles with his identity and who always fights his father due to their differences in opinion. “Aguantando” follows the story of how Yunior is anticipating to hear from his father that has left to go work in the USA. “Drown” explains the thoughts and feelings from a narrator regarding a friend departing after they share several sexual experiences. The research paper is going to focus on these three stories and the examination of how the title …show more content…

In “Fiesta” we see Yunior struggle with masculinity and how he is learning to be masculine from his father and his brother. Yunior’s uncle believes that he should be drinking alcohol already and should also be getting laid by his age. The story portrays masculinity as a social construct which is connected to the social and historical context (Riofrio, 24). Masculinity is a way a person identifies with the world. Yunior’s father is having an affair with another woman and even brings Yunior to the woman’s house after the party. In the Latino setting, we see infidelity being praised and people identifying themselves as men when they are having an affair. Yunior’s brother also goes to be with Leti, and he is left guarding the party. All these characters from “Fiesta” are trying to identify with masculinity and the actions of being a man (Santiago, 12). Another example of the father’s controlling patriarchy is his use of harsh punishment to make his family obey and respect him. Yunior states his father “expected your undivided attention when you were getting your ass whupped.” The entire family accepts and endures this treatment (Diaz,

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In the book Drown by Junot Diaz, there was a father that really never settled. Ramon was portrayed as the father figure in the book and it shocked me how he left his family in San Diego, and went to the United States to earn some more money but also did something bad. It 's hard to see when a father with kids cheats on his wife, lies to his father in law in order to secure money and comes to the United states to make more money. It is understandable that when you travel to get a better job and do that in order support a family you would come back to the family and share the earnings. It is cruel what Ramon did because as he arrived to New York and started working but also found someone to have an affair with and forgot about the committed marriage

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The need for “American Luxuries” in the book , “Enrique's Journey,” causes men and mainly women to leave their families behind. They leave tailing memories of their young children , poor and defenceless. Later in their teenage years, or sometimes even younger, they go on in search of their long lost parents. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Sonia Nazario re-tells an amazing story based upon the journey of Enrique, a confused and troubled boy in search of his mother, who fled to the U.S when he was five years of age. Nazario uses credibility and emotional appeal to inform the fleeding parents, to think twice upon the vicious and deadly risks of immigrating to the United States.

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Not only does Diaz write novels and short stories, but he also takes action towards exposing the problems that Dominican people especially women face everyday. There might be some people who consider Diaz to be an Antifeminist and also a disgrace to his country, the Dominican Republic, but the only thing that Diaz is doing with his writing is exposing the reality of what its meant to be an immigrate from another country and how machismo affects Feminism in Latin cultures. Diaz shows his feminism by exposing machismo and what women in Latin cultures deal with everyday. Machismo is a term used to describe the dominant male behavior in Latin cultures. Machismo can also be describe as a man objectifying a women as a

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In the memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos, the performance of masculinity of the people is illuminated. This is seen with most of the men conforming to the gendered expectations of a man, some confidently defying and conforming at the same time, and Riqui not daring to disturb the universe, but having a hard time conforming to all the expectations. As a child when it was just his grandmother giving him a hard time about acting and looking like a man, Riqui defied many of the gendered expectations. However, when these expectations started coming from friends then he started to attempt to act like he was expected. Riqui defies gendered expectations of a boy through his interest in the girly things like Cinderella, dolls and makeovers; however,

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In “The Art of Drowning” by Billy Collins, he inquires the thought of life flashing before your eyes when you are reaching an imminent death. When the character leaps underneath the surface to his aqueous grave, a fast depiction of a long life is rotated through his mind. Mr. Collins explains how weird it is that time crushed into such a short film in the final seconds of life. Collins reverie of an ultimate instant when all corners of the existence resided come together for an impressive production, a sit down gathering where all moments are commended in great detail and discussion. Appalled by the moment, is as quick as the time it takes for the oxygen to exhaust in a moribund, drowning man.

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In the story, “The Myth of a Latin Woman” is about the author Judith Ortiz Cofer talking about her life and growing up as a Puerto Rican girl. She talks about the struggles she had to go through, like always being under heavy surveillance by her family. She would be under their watch because she was a girl and was expected to protect her family’s honor and to behave like in her family’s terms “proper senorita”. I agree that she was forced to mature fast just at her teenage years; a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe Cofer could never act her age.

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“Volar” is a short story about a Puerto Rican immigrant family written by Judith Ortiz Cofer. The family immigrates into the United States in order to have a supposed better life. , The American dream is often defined as that dream of a land in which dreams come true, and unfortunately and ironically enough this isn’t the circumstance that this Puerto Rican family is facing. I will analyze literary elements of symbols by using the dreams of the protagonist, the little girl, from Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “Volar” to demonstrate the theme of the impossible dream; which is that American dream that she will never be able to achieve due to her family’s circumstances.

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The stories of Junot Diaz feature various elements of social and personal issues that are highly prevalent in young Latinx men, primarily the compulsion and adverse effect of machismo, the poignancy of being an outcast in one’s community, and the lack of a father figure in a boy’s life. The first set of short stories prominently feature Ysrael, a Dominican boy whose face was disfigured by a pig when he was an infant. In “Ysrael”, he is the object of Yunior’s fascination, and the victim or Rafa’s (Yunior’s brother) torment.

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Class and gender/sexuality are complicated in “Drown” by Junot Díaz. Yunior and Beto are ex-best friends who are separated through the complications. Their relationship tenses up when Beto decides to better his life through education. At first glimpse, Yunior’s struggle with class and sexuality could be based within his homophobic fear. The typical understanding that Yunior’s unmotivated attitude stems from fear is flawed because it fails to recognize his stance to not change who he believes he is and where he is meant to be.

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1414 Words | 6 Pages

Many stories embody the cultural aspects of Mexican-Americans and their struggles with living in a discriminatory society. Stories like With

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Cofer addresses the cultural barriers and challenges that Latinos experience through emotional appeal, anecdotal imagery, parallelism and the use of effective periodic sentences. In her article, Cofer assesses the difficult cultural hurdles of Latin Americans with emotional appeal. She provides insight on her cultural barriers by first conveying the way she had to dress and her struggle, as it shows in this piece of text, “That morning I had organized… which to base my decision” (Cofer 5). This poignancy works to stress an agonizing feeling of uncertainty and restraint towards the author.

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1536 Words | 7 Pages

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

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The element of violence is vital because it separates masculinity and femininity. The presence of masculinity and femininity as a whole is utilized as a tangible form of validation. Characters seek extensively for fulfillment through satisfying the suppositions provided by the surrounding society. Violence aids in defining the characteristics that create the ideal men and women. The idealism established and supported by violence is the backbone of the themes.

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“Fiesta 1980” father and son. Junot Diaz story “Fiesta 1980” is a story about an immigrant family that came to the US in the hunt for better opportunities. The story includes a myriad number of culturalisms to show that Yunior’s family is still new and that they still conserve their traditions. Nevertheless, Yunior’s family is not so different from many other Hispanic families in the US; a great amount of Hispanics families can be represented by “Fiesta 1980”.

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Until this point, the two stories are similar and advance more of the same theme. The following paper thus seeks to analyze the

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