The Growth of Yunior's Character

Junot Diaz’s Drown is a collection of short stories, many of which feature a common narrator, Yunior. As we progressed from one story to the next, we began to build a characterization of Yunior as a person. Often our characterization is in the form of a comparison to other characters mainly his brother, and no I will try and form my general description of Yunior that I got from the handful of stories he appeared in. I think that as a character, Yunior grows over the years, and because we see Yunior, as the narrator, at varying ages, we are exposed to this growth.

The first time we meet Yunior is in “Ysrael”. In this short story, Yunior is very young both in actual age, and in maturity (especially when compared to his brother). This first story is important for setting the groundwork of Yunior’s character, but not for the major aspects of Yunior, because as we discussed in class, at this point in the story he does not have much of a personality. By this I mean that he spends most of the story following his brother around. The interactions between Yunior and his brother are what gives us the most insight into Yunior’s character. From this first story, we see that young Yunior is much less confident than his older brother, and this fact will come up in future stories as well.

The second story is “Fiesta” and in this short story, Yunior is older and in a different setting: the United States. This time the important dynamic is that of Yunior and his father. Here we are shown the shy version of Yunior, because of the aggressive nature of both his father and brother. Yunior is still a young kid who is trying to cope with a difficult family situation at home with a cheating father, and this situation helps to steer his growth later on.

“How to date a browngirl” I believe is, chronologically, the next Yunior story in this collection, and it takes place during his high school years. This was for me the most interesting story in terms of Yunior’s personality, because I was able to see a slight change from before. This story takes the form of a “how to”. Yet it is more than that, because it lets us in on the experiences of Yunior throughout his high school years, and what he was thinking during this time. My thoughts of Yunior’s personality after reading this specific short story was that he was a mix of his mother and his brother.

My reasoning for thinking this is that throughout the story, Yunior thinks about the girls as sexual objects that he is trying to get with, which is typical of his brother, but there are also points where he is nice to them which reminded me of his mother. There were times when Yunior was talking about presenting himself well to the girl and her mother, which would be something his mother would say. I know this mainly because of the cigarette scene in another story when the mother said “Your father gave me the whole pack”. This mix of brother and mother made me think that Yunior was now growing into his own person, which makes his personality all the more interesting.

There was one final major aspect to Yunior that comes up in the short story collection, and that is understanding. This is a trait that is typical of an older person, and it is only fitting that the best example of this is in “Negocios”. We assume that Yunior is narrating this further into the future, and we are given a glimpse of what Yunior has become. Although the story is based around the father, and his experience in the U.S., as we talked about in class, the way that the narrator (Yunior) depicts his father, that is in a fair and understanding way, tells a lot about how Yunior has grown. Since he does not look down on his father but rather states the facts, it leads me to believe that he has grown from the boy who had no individuality into his own understanding person.