Radically Edited Draft

                Drown, a fictional book by Junot Diaz, which mainly depicts the life of a Dominican family both in the Dominican Republic and in the US, surprised me with the way it was written. Despite having plenty  of emotional scenes that readers would expect to include many of the characters’ inner feelings, Diaz leaves many feelings out of the book. Why Diaz would leave out so many character feelings seemed confusing at first. But, when analyzed more closely, this is a style employed by Diaz that works perfectly for the book. Diaz intentionally leaves out the feelings of the characters as a way to let readers relate to the different and unusual situations that the characters find themselves in, while also keeping the characters interesting, relatable, and important to the story, which allows the reader to better understand the themes presented by Diaz in the story, because understanding why Diaz leaves out feelings helps readers decipher the characters in the story themselves.

Diaz is able to help readers adapt to his book by making the book cater to people with all different characteristics. This is done through having few feelings readily available to the reader. By doing so, the reader is able to feel how he or she wants to feel, instead of being told how to feel. Connecting to an unfamiliar situation like many settings in Drown is important to connecting to the meaning of the book. Letting the reader feel how he or she wants to feel lets the reader adapt because the reader is able to make the characters, and then the situation, relate to him or her more easily.

This technique is valuable because connecting to characters whose feelings are told to you, especially in an unfamiliar situation, does not aid adaptation to the book. To adapt, one must understand what they’re adapting to. If the reader is told how to feel, he only knows one thing about the situation at hand- how one specific individual felt in one instance. However, if the reader is left alone to feel the situation for themselves, the reader can more readily place him or herself into the situation. This will teach the reader about the entire situation, not just one feeling, which is far more helpful for making connections and understanding ideas.

Diaz uses this style of few feelings throughout the book, and it connects the reader with the story. One example is on page 84, when Yunior discusses how his mom comes back from living with Yunior’s uncles and aunts for many weeks, because her husband lied about coming to take them to the US. This is clearly an emotional scene, but Yunior offers none of his feelings, or any of his family members’ feelings. This is an intentional move by Diaz. Not all of his readers will have been through such an experience, so just saying what Yunior felt wouldn’t give the reader anything- the reader wouldn’t be able to connect to the passage at all. However, by using this style, Diaz allows the reader to approach this difficult situation from whichever angle the reader chooses. Diaz allows the reader to input his or her feelings into the situation, for multiple characters. Perhaps Yunior was worried for his mom, or maybe relieved she was back. We don’t know. But the beauty of Diaz’s style is that it could be either of those, or something else entirely. Because the reader wants to gain something from reading the book, the reader will input the feeling to this situation that best allows him or her to connect to this passage, and ultimately adapt to this previously unfamiliar situation.

Diaz allows for this kind of outside-in connection by being ambiguous and leaving space for feelings. In the text, he doesn’t specify any feelings, nor does he make it clear what you are “supposed” to feel in this situation. The words are descriptive, but not forceful. This allows the reader to be able to add in feelings in his or her mind, and warp the text into some shape that fits the scheme of the reader’s mind. That is, the reader is able to take the text, add in feelings that he or she sees as fitting, and have an easier time making connections to the text.

This “ambiguous description” serves as the beginning of how Diaz connects his readers to seemingly strange and unfamiliar situations. This is shown on page 84. “Mami’s time away was never discussed, then or now. When she returned to us, five weeks later, she was thinner and darker…” Diaz, like a woodworker expertly trained in his craft, works around the story in such a way that we understand the situation, but we don’t know what the mood or feeling of some characters are. Diaz shows us that this is an emotional topic in the family- it isn’t discussed. Then, he goes on to talk about Mami after she returns after a long time. We don’t know how Mami feels after being away for so long, and we don’t know how Yunior feels about being back with his mom, but we do know about the general situation. Fine-tuned passages like this are the backbone of Diaz’s method of letting few feelings become a jumping off-point for readers to connect with characters in seemingly distant or unrelatable passages in the story.

Just as important as being able to relate to characters in the story are the characters being complex and unique. Without this, relating to the characters would be like relating to a bar of soap- there would be nothing to gain.

Diaz’s few feelings manage to both connect the reader to characters, and develop the characters to be intricate, complex, and realistic.

One way that Diaz makes his characters more complex is through the feelings Diaz does leave in, and the effect of having so few feelings otherwise. Feelings that are left in by Diaz are wormholes into another dimension- they are portals that allows us to, finally, look inside parts of the heads of the characters. Instead of being very “two-dimensional” characters in a 3D world, where we can look over the character and see everything inside, we are limited. We are limited to seeing only what Diaz gives us. This “three-dimensional” character is more complex, and it makes it harder for the reader to learn more about the characters than Diaz allows the reader to. The characters, then, are more interesting and more realistic. They mimic reality because people also do not know everything about each other, and this lack of total knowledge makes the character more interesting. Diaz doesn’t allow readers to be able to predict every character’s every move.

This incremental character composition that Diaz uses is exemplified when Yunior is talking about his dad. Through most of the book up to this point, Yunior had rarely shown the reader emotion. Finally, though, we get a small window on page 27. “It was like my God-given duty to piss [my dad] off, to do everything the way he hated. Our fights didn’t bother me too much. I still wanted him to love me…” Because of how few feelings Diaz puts into the story, this one emotion that Yunior lets out becomes a massive part of Yunior’s character at the time. This is exactly how this slow, incremental character development works. We don’t get to see all of Yunior. We see parts, which is enough to give us some information about him, but not enough to pick apart every aspect of his character. This means that to the reader, the characters are complex, and are useful to understanding the story as a whole.

Aside from this slow and steady character development through remaining feelings in the story, Diaz also uses the lack of many feelings to develop his characters in a relatable manner. Diaz does this by bonding or connecting characters through actions, instead of through feelings. The characters need to have some areas to relate to, and the lack of feelings shown by the characters opens a hole in the character that the reader can connect to easily, by putting his or her own feelings in place of the character’s feelings, as discussed before. However, if the characters did not interact effectively with one another, they wouldn’t be complex or meaningful. Diaz solves this paradox effectively by using the actions of the characters to help connect the characters.

Diaz’s characters interact through actions and connect to the reader via the reader’s inputted feelings, which allows for complex characters that can also be related to. This is achieved mainly through Diaz’s solution to keep characters complex: Interaction and connection between characters through actions. Two main actions that Diaz uses to complete this are description and dialogue.

An example of important character interaction that takes place without feelings being shown by Yunior’s narration is on page 85. “We’re taking the day off, she [Mom] announced. A day for us as a family. But we don’t need a day off, I said and Rafa hit me harder than normal. Shut up, OK? I tried to hit him back but Abuelo grabbed us both by the arm. Don’t make me have to crack your heads open, he said.” Even though feelings aren’t included by Diaz, there is still interesting and complex character interaction going on between the various members of the family. Furthermore, a reader would still be able to connect to the characters more easily because the characters’ sentiments are left open to interpretation.

Diaz’s use of the feelings and lack of feelings to both make his characters complex and relatable compliments his style of using the reader’s feelings to connect to the story very well. This combination is massively important because it allows the reader to connect to the characters, and because the characters are so complex, gain something out of connecting to the characters- connecting to the characters can help develop the themes of the book in the reader’s head.

Some people might argue that if the situations are unfamiliar in the story, then readers will have a very difficult time trying to figure out how they should feel in any given situation. While at first, this might seem true- if someone has never experienced something, how might they know how to feel?

However, Diaz overcomes this issue with one more technique for helping readers understand a situation- the objective correlative. The objective correlative is an artistic technique that uses an object, event, or series of events to evoke a feeling. Diaz adapts this tool to fit his problem by letting the objective correlative simplify complex and unfamiliar situations, and also hint the reader towards the feelings of the characters, which gives the reader some clue about what a situation means to the characters in the story.

Diaz champions the objective correlative, but makes it speak to his needs, instead of using it only for artistic value. One clear demonstration of Diaz’s expert usage of the objective correlative is on page 93. “Starting at the deep end [of a pool] I glide over the slick-tiled bottom without kicking up a spume or making a splash. Sometimes another swimmer churns past me, more a disturbance of water than a body. … While everything above is loud and bright, everything below is whispers.” This is an excellent example of an objective correlative. While the text itself seems to show Yunior’s experience in a pool, the writing, and context around this excerpt, makes this stand out and evoke a general idea of a feeling onto the reader. The context to any objective correlative is important as well, because it can help identify what the objective correlative is really speaking about. In this case, Yunior is thinking about his friend, Beto. Even though Diaz doesn’t explicitly say it in this passage, the objective correlative helps us identify a closer range of possibilities for what Yunior could be thinking about.

From the phrasing and word choice of this objective correlative, we can start to decrypt it. When I read this passage, the word “glide” and the phrase “more a disturbance than a body” stood out to me. Glide gives the connotation of effortless motion, pure and dream-like. To me, this symbolized a kind of deep thought- thinking while moving, not paying attention to surroundings. “Everything below is whispers” seems to further this idea, a kind of muffled reality, stuck in one’s thoughts.

From this objective correlative, I got the feeling of deep thought and reflection- an insight into Yunior. This is half of the job that Diaz assigns the objective correlative- giving off an air of some feeling, or range of feelings, that might help the reader understand the situation Yunior finds himself in a little more.

Other than evoking these feelings, the objective correlative seeks to change the nature of a complex situation into something more tangible. Yunior is in a complex situation outside of the objective correlative. He’s thinking about his relationship with his friend, and doesn’t really know what to do. He’s stuck, and unsure.

The objective correlative seeks to explain this complex and intricate situation into one that a reader might more easily identify with. It does this by explaining the situation in terms of a series of events. It doesn’t describe the situation itself, but what it is like. It takes all the complexities and forms them into on paragraph. Although it is not a perfect representation of the situation at hand, the objective correlative simplifies the situation so the reader can more easily make important connections to it.

These two focuses of the objective correlative work together to counteract the issue of unfamiliar situations the reader might find him or herself in. Diaz uses the main goal of the objective correlative- to emit a sense of a feeling out of some kind of scene- and combines it with a byproduct of the objective correlative- a simplified, but still complicated and useful version of the events. In this way, the reader is able to connect to seemingly unfamiliar situations, and get some idea of the feeling of the character in the situation. These techniques combined mean that the reader isn’t lost, but brought closer to understanding the book.

Diaz weaves his story together without many feelings to create both a more understandable course of events in the story, by letting the reader add in his or her own feelings into the story, and also creating intricate and important characters by using actions to create complex relationships between characters, so that the reader can better understand the messages and characters in the story. By understanding why Diaz leaves out so many feelings, we can better understand the character of figures in the story without their feelings, which allows us a unique and important window into a deeper understanding of the issues of the book.