Analysis Of The Poem ' Drown ' By Junot Diaz

Castillo demonstrates injustice in patriarchy by using symbolism. In the novel, Caridad is cheated on by her boyfriend Memo. Caridad starts to heavily drink after work, and while doing so she decides that Memo isn’t the only man she wants to give her love to. Following the drinking, Caridad begins to have meaningless sex with the random men she meets at bars. One

Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980” relates a story of Yunior, a young Dominican boy, and what he experiences in his family trip to a party. In narrating the story, Yunior employs a unique choice of a cultural shift in diction; there is a continuous change between English and Spanish words, which creates both a sense of familial intimacy and cultural struggle in adjusting to the United States. Additionally, Yunior tells the story in a past-tense narrative, thereby allowing himself the room to express a scene both in an immature perspective as a child, as well as a mature one as an older, more reflective version of himself. Altogether, the integration of two different languages and two different perspectives work together to portray a more holistic picture of Yunior’s childhood experience.

1. If you were asked to paraphrase "what happens" in the poem, what would you say? What does it mean to dive into the wreck?

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by, Junot Díaz explores into many issues in the Dominican community. One issue, he shows the audience is the sexim in the community. Throughout the story, one can see how men and women are treated in the culture. Also, one can see the hypocrisy in the culture between men and women.“The Brief Life of Oscar Wao”, shows that in the Dominican community, men believe they have the right to abuse and be deceitful to women and women think it is fine to endure the abuse due to the community’s belief which influence their upbringing, however, characters such as Oscar and Lola broke these norms of the community proving that people have the choice to make their own decisions.

A single mother’s frustration, in the short story Drown Mami and her two son’s Yunior and Rafa a Dominican family living in New York City try to cope with their mom being a single parent.

In This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, the most prominent stereotype that is introduced is how the typical male from the Dominican Republic acts. From the opening sentence of the book Yunior, our unreliable narrator, makes the claim that he is not a bad guy. Using context clues from the title and the abruptness of this statement, the reader can conclude that it must do with a relationship. This declaration gives the reader an inclusive look of the stereotypical Dominican man. Diaz’s style of writing allows for the reader to be able to meticulously analyze his work and formulate their own opinions on the characters, all while guiding them with noticeable hints on what he is trying to accomplish. In the collection of short stories This Is How You Lose Her (2012) by Junot Diaz,

In the story The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of a dead man body who inspires villagers to change their landscapes, buildings, and houses. While, two kids are playing on the beach near their small village, they approach a dead man in the water. One of the men from the village decides to spread the news around the village. It turns out that the dead man does not belong to anyone in the village, so the women decide to name him “Esteban”. The village notices that Esteban is different from the others. They admire how he is the best man they have ever seen.

Garcia Marquez constructs the Vicario brothers using an elegant combination of direct and indirect characterization to portray them as the typical tough and aggressive ‘alpha males’. The diction of the direct descriptions is well chosen, peculiar expressions such as ‘backwoods look’ (p. 54) and ‘barrack-room’ (p.60) succeed in depicting the brothers as rough and perhaps slightly ordinary men. Garcia Marquez relies heavily on indirect characterization, describing the brothers’ attitude and behaviour of sleeping on benches (p. 30), drinking ‘liquid fire’ (p. 64) and ‘[shaving] with butcher knife’ (p. 64). These pictorial descriptions are effectively supported by glimpses of other characters’ opinions about the brothers, such as ‘He looked like a killer in the movies’ (p. 64), ‘they couldn’t have got their blood pressure up even with lamp oil’ (p. 54) and the sentence ‘they were hard-looking but of a good sort’, which effectively conveys society’s supreme valuation of traditional masculine characteristics. Readers are able to recognize the typical characteristics of a traditional male figure embodied in the brothers and picture them as mere products of a machista society.

Through characters such as Santiago, Bayardo and the Vicario brothers, the author does not only criticize how men benefit the culture by being authoritarians, but specifically that they are victims of a double-standard. The male characters might appear to benefit the culture, but as the novel develops, the male figures merely victims of a culture that dictates the actions they should take. This is important because Marquez discusses the importance of social norms in a sexist society and sheds light onto an everlasting problem in Latin-American countries. In his novel, Marquez shows that the death of Santiago could have been avoided had machismo not existed uses it to denounce how feudal it all

Sea of insensibility, Elixir of oblivion, My vessel of escape. When I do not wish to live, Yet do not want to die, You are my sweet compromise

Machismo is an attitude, quality or way of behaving that agrees with traditional ideas of masculinity, defining the stature of a man by his predisposed dominant nature. It is in this domination that the fragility of the masculine condition is recognized, conceptually the natural philosophy relies on incessant validation through the means of domination. However, masculinity becomes a reaction against passivity which leads to a self-destructive identity proving its fragility as an ideology and not a biological reality. In Blood Wedding, Francisco Lorca defines masculine fragility as the perpetual need to validate one's own machismo, making a commentary on

Values are a vital part of any community. Values help shape the identity of a culture and help to form the identity of every individual. Sometimes these embedded values have more power over a person than one believes. Through the interactive oral I was informed of the female role in Colombian society and machismo. This lead me to examine specifically the idea that women in the text, unconsciously internalize the value that they are the inferior gender of this society, while men are expected to epitomize machismo in their daily ideology. This allowed me to further my understanding of  the different roles of the characters in this novel.

While society portrays men are portrayed as dominant and the leader of the household as and may determine the idea of masculinity, men may be susceptible to the same hardships as women as well. One example is Díaz’s “Fiesta” where the boy narrator and his brother, Rafi, withold his father’s infidelity a secret from their mother for favor of keeping the family together. While acts of infidelity are frowned upon and the father may be described as a toxic figure to the household with child abuse, the boy narrator suffers from emotional and physical

At the beginning of Adrienne Rich’s poem- “Diving into the Wreck”, the poet uses “book of myths, camera, knife, body armor, and grave and awkward mask” to start the poem. Through those words, it is hard to tell if she wants to fight for women’s rights, or just “dive into the wreck.” However, in general, people usually use their cameras to take pictures or record videos to memorialize things that happened to them in the past. Therefore, why does the speaker emphasize loading the camera, and checking the knife in the poem? Going back to the poem, “First having read the book of myths/ and loaded the camera/and checked the edge of the knife-blade/” the speaker uses reading the book, load the camera, and check the knife to emphasize the process of diving into the ocean to see wrecks. In addition, the speaker wears the body-armor and puts on a mask. Under the 1970s’ context, the women’s movement just starts. So she has to be a soldier to fight for the women’s rights. She has to do it, not only for her, she also tends to help other women to fight for theirs. However, “alone” underlines her loneliness in fighting during that time. She wants to get some help but nobody can help her or support her. She is alone, therefore, she has to be strong, strengthen herself by the process of diving into the ocean.

Superiority is having strength and power over a group of people whether it be in your town, at work, or on a sports team. Being superior can come with many advantages and it can impact many people's view on you. An example of this situation would be in the book, The Scarlet Letter. Throughout the book society reacts to the thought of Dimmesdale sinning very differently than Hester because of his high role in the Puritan society and being the minister in town. No matter what, the townspeople never believe that Dimmesdale sins, even when he confesses to his sin.