FINAL ESSAY

                                                            Drown: A Plan Built for Success

      Drown, by Junot Diaz, 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 rarely shows the reader the characters’ feelings outright. Why Diaz would seemingly leave out so many feelings seemed confusing at first. But, when analyzed more closely, this is a style employed by Diaz that works perfectly for the book. By looking at the effect that not directly giving characters’ feelings has on both the reader and the characters, we can get closer to determining Diaz’s intentions for doing this.

Diaz intentionally leaves out the obvious feelings of the characters as a way to let readers relate to the different and unfamiliar situations that the characters find themselves in, while also keeping the characters interesting, relatable, and important to the story. To build on this, Diaz guides the reader with more subtle and disguised feelings of his characters towards the themes of the story, once the reader has made connections to the text itself. This technique allows the reader to better understand the themes presented by Diaz in the story, because understanding why Diaz leaves out obvious feelings and includes subtle ones helps readers decipher the characters in the story themselves, who help deliver the themes of the book.

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.  This style of leaving few feelings for the reader to easily see is important to allow the reader to adapt to the story. Instead of being forced to feel something unfamiliar, the reader can adapt the situation to make him or herself more familiar to it. In one example of an emotional scene, Diaz offers little evidence of what characters actually felt. Instead, the narrator fills the gap with description and dialogue. “She’s gone, he said. So cry all you want, malcriado. I learned later from Rafa that she was in Ocoa with our tios.  Mami’s time away from us was never discussed, then or now. When she returned to us, five weeks later, she was thinner and darker…”(Diaz 84). This scene is intentionally left open by Diaz, to let the readers imagine the situation for themselves, and feel for themselves as well. The reader, at first, has room to connect to the passage however he or she chooses to. This technique allows initial connections to the text to be made.

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 directly, nor does he make it clear what you are “supposed” to feel in this situation. The words are descriptive, but not very forceful. This allows the reader to take the text, add in feelings that he or she sees as fitting, and have an easier time making connections to the familiarized version of the text.

This “ambiguous description” serves as the beginning of how Diaz connects his readers to seemingly strange and unfamiliar situations, but to connect the reader with the themes of the story, Diaz does more.  Diaz guides the reader towards his point with subtle descriptions and actions, which hint at the feelings of the characters, and move the reader towards themes of the story. The reader overlooks these subtle pieces of text at first, which is key to the success of this style. Diaz draws the reader into the text with open connections that the reader makes. But once the reader is drawn into the text, and begins to connect with the text, these subtle parts are more visible to the reader. These subtle feelings act as a railway, guiding the reader towards the main ideas of the book.

Diaz employs this subtle indication of feelings in the passage discussed before, and it compliments and builds off of the open connections the reader makes. Although not immediately obvious, Diaz shows that Yunior was, in fact, upset and saddened by his mother’s departure. Diaz writing “so cry all you want, malcriado”(Diaz 84) shows that in fact, Yunior had been crying over his mother’s leaving, and from this, readers start to see some of the main ideas Diaz wishes to present, like that of the importance of family. This passage originally drew the reader in with its open connections because of its lack of obvious feelings. But after this “phase” of Diaz’s style, the reader was subjected to the more subtle feelings of the passage, which Diaz uses to guide readers towards some of his main ideas.

Diaz’s two-phase plan of open connection and then subtle guiding effectively connects the reader first to the book itself, and then to main ideas. In books that are not designed and built as eloquently as Drown, the reader is thrown into unfamiliarity, and the main ideas are harder to see, even if the book is less complex. Being thrown into an unfamiliar situation without the gentle touch Diaz uses disorients the reader and makes possible themes seem less powerful. Take, for example, a clearly emotional scene in Emily Rodda’s Deltora Quest series: “He felt excitement, eagerness, and a thrill of fear at the thought of what was ahead” (Rodda 131). The reader is directly given the feelings of a character. Indeed, the reader does not have to do anything to realize this feeling but read. This makes possible themes of personal empowerment or, maybe, bravery less obvious, and less potent. The reader, without connecting to the text, has no way to communicate with these main ideas, and so the main ideas do not speak to the reader with the same kind of power as the themes do in Drown.

Just as important as being able to relate and connect 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 from Diaz’s work to connect readers with the characters through their feelings. Diaz’s style, though, manages 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 direct feelings Diaz does leave in, and the effect of having so few obvious 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, the characters are three-dimensional, and so we are limited. We are limited to seeing only what Diaz gives to the reader in these “wormholes”. 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 learn. This limited knowledge makes the character more interesting because we cannot predict every action characters make, and characteristics of different characters are revealed to the reader as the stories go on.

This limited knowledge also makes characters far more realistic. They mimic reality because people also do not know everything about each other in real life. It makes the story seem more real when the reader is not always inside the character’s head, but instead looks on from the outside, wondering what the character is thinking or wondering what the character will do next. This sort of incremental character composition, slowly letting the reader into the character, provides this “real” aspect of the characters.

This incremental character composition that Diaz uses shows little about the character, but enough so that the reader can make important connections to the character that develop the character for the reader. When  Yunior is talking about his dad, this is shown. Through most of the book up to this point, Yunior had rarely shown the reader emotion. Finally, though, we get a small window through a big emotion. “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…” (Diaz 24). Here, Diaz is giving us an obvious emotion from Yunior. These crucial points give the window into the character. From just this emotion, Diaz lets the reader see and understand much more about Yunior and his relationship with his dad. This is a driving force for the story at that point because readers, like meeting any other family for the first time, know very little about the relationship between father and son. This means that to the reader, the characters are complex, and are useful to understanding the story as a whole when they do give information that moves the story.

Aside from this slow and steady character development through remaining feelings in the story, Diaz also uses the lack of many direct feelings to develop his characters so that they are relatable. An important way to make characters relatable is by making them seem more human by bonding or connecting characters, which is a very human idea. The characters’ feelings, though, are often hidden from the reader for some time, which would seem to make character interaction very difficult. However, if the characters did not interact effectively with one another, they wouldn’t be complex or meaningful to the story, and they wouldn’t be as relatable. Diaz solves this paradox effectively by using the actions of the characters to help connect the characters to one another.

Diaz’s characters interact through actions, specifically dialogue and description, and connect to the reader through the open connections that Diaz allows. This technique allows for complex characters that can also be related to.

Even though feelings are often subtle and take time to figure out, Diaz uses dialogue and actions to create interesting and complex character interactions. Yunior’s narration shows this technique. “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” (Diaz 85). Feelings are sparse or subtle in the text, but the actions and discussion between characters make for interesting interaction between the characters. We see the action of Rafa hitting Yunior, and the dialogue between those two, and their grandfather as well. The combination of these is a situation that includes lots of interaction.

Aside from helping make his characters relatable, Diaz makes sure that a reader would still be able to connect to the characters more easily because the characters’ feelings are, at first, seemingly left open to interpretation. Diaz does not mess with the open and connection-ready text, because he still makes the feelings subtle, instead of obvious. In this way, Diaz kills two birds with one stone- he makes his characters complex and relatable, and he makes sure that readers can still connect to the story and the characters at the same time.

These effects that this style produces are 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 helps develop the themes of the book in the reader’s head.

Diaz’s style of subtle feelings is a plan that he uses to take the reader from looking at something new and unfamiliar to understanding the characters and ideas that Diaz presents in the book. This is done by leaving the text seemingly open for connections by not forcing feelings onto readers. Once this happens, Diaz’s second phase enters play- connecting the reader to the characters with the emergence of the subtle, but important feelings of the characters. Finally, the characters in the story are still complex and relatable because of how Diaz works around the lack of many obvious feelings. All in all, Diaz uses this style to write about a series of complex and multidimensional issues in a way that allows most readers to help themselves connect to the issues, and the themes presented in the story that come from these issues and how the characters react to these issues.

Works Cited

Díaz, Junot. Drown. New York: Riverhead, 1996. Print.

Rodda, Emily. Forest of Silence. London: Scholastic, 2003. Print.