In this black comedy, Díaz depicts the life of a Dominican boy who never quite becomes the traditional macho male. In the New Jersey-based stories, the narrators, all of whom may or may not be Yunior, share Yunior’s sensibility: the suspicious watchfulness and defensive stance, the blighted relationship with the father figure, and the uneasiness in relationships with women, which move from tenderness to violence. Five of the stories in Drown share the same narrator, Ramón de las Casas, known as Yunior, a young boy whose narratives of a somewhat blighted Dominican childhood become the tales of a rather traumatized inner-city New Jersey adolescent. There are friends and neighbors who come across each other from time to time in these tales, but they merge and separate, like the proverbial ships that pass in the night, leaving little in their wake.

In this book, there is little semblance of a community–in the sense of groups living lives of multileveled communication with each other. The book depicts accusation against those forces in American society that condemned some ethnic minorities to alienation, discrimination, and disillusionment, it was also a book that assumed that these conditions could be altered through political action. His descriptions are passionate and impassive. In the collection, Diaz omits political intentions and struggle but concentrates on exploitation of immigrants and racism as themes of masculinity. The theme of masculinities involves description of poverty and hardship, youth struggling against the conditions of life for urban Africa-American youth. Diaz does not use such popular devices as fantasy and poetic style but concentrates on with depicting the humiliation and everyday problems of inner-city life. In this collection, masculinities help the author to create an atmosphere of struggle and fight, poverty and hardship faced by men in the Dominican Republic. In the collection of stories, Junot Diaz portrays African-American experience, focusing on how characters struggle to find their unique self and their cultural identity living in an unjust society, Díaz portrays the great human loss of identity and self.

Drown by junot diaz chapter summary