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The story of immigrant struggles is the major theme in Drown by Junot Diaz.
Every immigrant has a personal story, pains and joys, fears and victories, and
Díaz portrays much of his own story of immigrant life in Drown, a collection of
10 short stories. This book captures the fury and alienation of the Dominican
immigrant experience very well. Other immigrants' grief's also come up in Díaz's
short stories. My argument for this paper delves with the question of is this
book merely storytelling or is it autobiographical? Also, it seemed to me as if
he uses some symbols and specific words (mostly verbs) to express himself in a
manner which the reader can almost feel the story as if it were real. The book
tells of the barrios of the Dominican Republic and the struggling urban
communities of New Jersey. This book is very strong and these stories tell of a
sense of discovery from a young man's perspective. It seems as though for the
immigrants, even when things are at their best, a high probability of calamity
looms just around the corner. Uncertainty is the only certainty for these
outsiders, who live in communities that, are separated from all the other
communities by a six-lane highway and the dump. It tells of a world in which
fathers are gone; mothers fight with determination for their families and
themselves. Drown brings out the conflicts, yearnings, and frustrations that
have been a part of immigrant life for centuries. Diaz himself lived in such a
world. In each of his stories Diaz uses a first-person narrator who is observing
others. Boys and young drug dealers narrate eight of these tales. Their
struggles shift from life in the barrios of the Dominican Republic to grim
existence in the slums of New Jersey. These young boys could be the voice of
Junot Diaz himself. If so, why would the book be a fiction? The characters in
these stories wrestle with recognizable traumas. Yunior and Rafa in Ysrael and
Fiesta 1990 confront the pain of growing up, the loss of innocence, and how
misfortune just happens to fall upon them. In Drown, Edison, New Jersey, Aurora,
we glimpse into anger stemming from unearned suffering, the embarrassment of
poverty, the confusion of loving a Crackhead, and shock of reality. Drown tells
of an impoverished, fatherless youth in the Dominican Republic and his struggle
with immigrant life in New Jersey. It shows pain and suffering very accurately.
The last and longest of the stories, Negocios, reconstructs the adventures of
Ramon, the father who left his wife and children behind to try to make it in the
States. It is told from the point of Yunior, the youngest son. Negocios, points
up this collection's one weakness. It is a chronicle of his father's
immigration, remarriage and, finally, the rescuing of his children and first
wife from their bleak life in the Dominican Republic.
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