Drown

Junot Diaz's short story collection, Drown, has a number of both unifying and disunifying elements that link the cycle together. We return to characters who are introduced in the initial chapters, such as Ysrael in "No Face," and the collection as a whole has some novelistic elements (for instance, in the first four stories, we follow Yunior's growth as a character, whereas he disappears from the narrative of the whole starting with "Aurora," where it is difficult to tell whether or not the narrator is Yunior.

The disconnections in this narrative are interesting to me, and inform the theme of both belonging and not belonging within American culture. Diaz creates this tension through the introduction of Spanish expressions interspersed with the dialogue, as well as mixing street slang with high, poetic diction. The language itself creates a tension of belonging neither here nor there. He also never uses quotation marks to mark off dialogue in his stories, which creates a tension where we as readers must create the mental separation between what is and isn't dialogue. I feel all these interspersions purposely create a tension where we also have to think and negotiate these liminal spaces.

As a writer, I have never thought how I could use the minority experience in my craft. I thought that I could only write from a white subject position because this was the literary culture I've inherited. Even though my short story cycle will probably be written from the perspective of white characters, keeping in tandem with what I've written my entire life, I feel this structure can be instructive because I do come from this in between place and that experience is valuable to write about - an acknowledgment I never received prior to college. I see how both form and structure can inform that experience.