Drown

Drown is a very cohesive piece with a  consistent narrator voice throughout. However, at certain times, it is unclear whether Junot Diaz has Yunior narrating the story. One of the most poignant examples of this is in "Negocios." Also in "No Face" the narrator is obviously Ysrael, the kid whose face was eaten off by a pig when he was a baby. Junot Diaz's collection is most like Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son" of the cycles we have read. They both have this dirty realism quality. While the stories are insightful and artistic, they also all show this dirtiness and grittiness of real life. Both of the cycles are about lower class individuals mixed up in alcohol and drugs and sex. However, the narrators in both cycles, Yunior and Fuckhead, respectively, are able to convey this poetic like language to the reader although we are painted a picture of their dirt, real world.  

Although the characters seem to be uneducated with nothing insightful or intelligent to say, there are moments when Yunior would surprise me. In "Edison, New Jersey" he shows a very advanced knowledge of history, "There are Incan Roads in the Andes that even today you couldn't work a knife between two of the cobblestones. The sewers that the Romans built in Bath were so good that they weren't replaced until the 1950s. That's the sort of thing I can believe in." Here he shows that he is actually very intelligent and knows quite a bit about something as abstract as artichectural methods of the ancient world. He is also able to analogize it to his present day situation at fixing pool tables. He takes something innovative, amazing and beautiful (the aqueducts of Rome and roads of the Incans) and is able to make a strong comparison with fixing tables. This is his reality, his dirty realism, that fixing tables to him is as much of an art and science as building aqueducts in ancient Rome. 

However, there is also that vulgarity throughout the cycle that keeps the reader placed in their dirty world. Right from the beginning in "Ysrael" the characters speak so frankly and vulgarly that its impossible to miss. This is how they speak, "He'd take the campo girls down to the dams and swim and if he was lucky they let him put it in their mouth or in their asses." And you have to remember this is a little child saying this. This statement is in stark contrast to the seemingly smart and proud man that knew so much about building aqueducts and prided himself on his skill of fixing pool tables.

The language of Yunior and his family and friends is what makes Drown, well, Drown. Its unique to anything else we have read. Right from the opening quote we know that language will be a major theme. The quote from Gustavo Perez Firmat tells us that although he is writing in English he has failed to tell you what he wanted to tell you because he does not belong to the English language culture. He does not belong to those traditional American values. He is an outcast in the mainstream society and through his language he makes this obvious. It sets him apart from main stream America, but it keeps him and his family together, keeping their culture and traditional language of the Dominican Republic. 

In high school I remember reading Denis Johnson's "Emergency" then reading Diaz's "Aurora" and thinking to myself that "Aurora" was just a Hispanic version of "Emergency." The styles of the two authors are very similar. But, now that I have read the stories the way they were supposed to be read, inside of their respective cycles I can see how each has its own unique language and style. For my writing cycle I would like to have a distinct language and style to it. One comprable to Johnson or Diaz. I want each story in my own cycle to feel similar to one that precedes and succeeds it. 

Jesus' Son

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is one of the more cohesive cycles we have read in this class in terms of narrator. While many of the cycles have had this omniscient narrator throughout, Jesus' Son's narrator not only tells us the story, but is the central protagonist. Each story is told through the eyes of "Fuckhead," a disillusioned, alcoholic, drug-addicted hospital orderly and aspiring writer. He travels throughout the midwest United States telling us his tales of meeting others like him and going through his drug and alcohol fueled adventures.

While on the surface Fuckhead appears to be a strung out loser, as I read each story I began to sympathize with the character more and more. He's very real. Although he's not relatable to me by any means, I find his actions and thought processes fascinating. He is so UNlike me that I find myself caring what happens to him and what he's doing. Deni Johnson makes him such a real, visible character that its hard not to sympathize with him. He's a human being in need of some serious assistance. Even as a reader you can't turn your back on him. 

The way in which Johnson is able to garner sympathy for Fuckhead is through the use of first-person narration. If he had written a cycle of short stories that were in the third-person then we would never have seen inside Fuckheads, well, head. He would just seem like a loser to us, someone polluting the world population that we would care lived or died. However, we are able to see what's going on in there. From the first story, we get this split persona of Fuckhead the drug-addict mess and Fuckhead the semi-caring, kind human being. In the first few pages of "Car Crash" he talks about all the bourbon he drank, hashish he smoked and amphetamines he guzzled down. We realize from the start that this man has a serious addiction problem. He remains in this inebriated state throughout the story, as well as throughout the cycle. However, once he is involved in the car crash that kills a man, Fuckhead shows his caring side. He holds on t o the baby that was in the car with him, making sure it was safe. He goes around the wreck seeing if he could help in any way. He then shows his all too human side once at the hospital. Once the woman is told that her husband has died in the car wreck, she begins hysterically crying and screaming. Fuckhead says, "It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere." While it may seem that Fuckhead himself is being entirely UNsympathetic to what is going one, he is just showing human nature. He had just been in involved in a deadly car wreck in which he survived without a scratch. Now he's sitting there listening to the torment of a woman who has just lost her husband. This makes him appreciate his life. No matter how terrible his life is going, and how terrible he knows it will be, he knows it is better than dying or have a loved one die on you. Anyone would feel like this. He's just happy to be alive. By the end of the cycle Fuckheads life is being to get back on track. He's shown us his moments of drug-addicted misadventures such as roaming around with Georgie or going bar to bar looking for a belly dancer. He's also shown as a kind side like when hes the only person who wants to bring McInnes to the hospital and cares if he lives or dies. He's a lost soul wandering the earth looking for some respect. He so desperately wants to be liked and just cannot seem to get what he wants. The drugs and alcohol are able to curb his appetite for human interaction and love, but it just never happens for him. Hes a sad character, one you have to not only sympathize with, but pity. 

Self-Help

Lorrie Moore's "Self-Help" fits the mold of a short story cycle perfectly, as one that does not require the same setting and recurring characters. As I read the stories I did find that the narrators, their mothers and significant others all blended into the same characters. After the first few two or three stories I even began to think that the narrators were all the same character, but then they were assigned different names and each had their own mother with some sort of psychological or physical ailment. From "How to be an Other Woman" to "To Fill" there is a constant voice from a female narrator. To me I felt like each of these women shared the same thoughts. One could easily have been substituted for another. While "Dubliners" relied on setting as a constant throughout the cycle and "Winesburg, Ohio" and "In Our Time" had recurring characters, "Self-Help" has none of these, except in spirit. 

That being said, I found "Self-Help" to be incredibly difficult to read. One of the major qualms I had with the way Lorrie Moore wrote is that most, if not all, the narrators were extremely either anti-male or had a very negative attitude towards men. Having to read almost 200 pages of feminist drawl was excruciatingly painful and boring. It made me want to jump into the book and argue with each narrator. While Moore can be praised with writing a cycle of short stories professing feminism and showing things from a woman's point of view, I felt that she may have done the opposite. All these women seem the same. Is that the message she wanted to send? That all women, when they are in similar circumstances, will act and think the same? She's grouping women together, not individualizing them. Can you really tell the difference between the mistress in the beige raincoat from "How to be an Other Woman" and the woman who cheats on her boyfriend from "How?" They act like the same person and blame the men in their lives for their problems. 

Both of these stories paint men in a negative light, albeit in different ways. The man in "an Other Woman" sleeps around, admitting that while he is not married, has several girlfriends at once while sleeping with the narrator. He obviously seen as a scumbag. The boyfriend in "How" is a very loving, friendly guy who treats his girlfriend well and wants to start a family with her. He loves her very much, yet the narrator pushes him away, cheats on him and tells him that she no longer loves him. HE was suffocating HER. Here you have a woman who hates the man she's with because he's sleeping around and in the next story you have a woman who hates the man she's with because he's too loving and too faithful. This makes no sense at all. This just draws women in a more negative light because Moore writes them as irrational. In fact, in almost every story the, for lack of a better word, antagonist, is a male. In "What Is Seized" there is the cold father.  In "A Kids Guide to Divorce" the father and ex-husbands side of the story is never shown. In "Go Like This" the loving husband Elliot is pushed aside and thought of as an "asshole" whenever he tries to help his dying wife. "In How to Talk to Your Mother" the father is extremely distant. In "Amahl" Moss the boyfriend gets very angry as the narrator tries to get closer to him. There really aren't any male characters painted in a positive light.

Another major theme is disease. In several stories the mothers of the narrators are sick and dying and in "Go Like This" the narrator has decided to end her own life while suffering from cancer. Most of the mothers in these stories are weak and pathetic, even before their illnesses begin to dominate their lives. Many of the mothers have been cheated on and are without a husband at the time of their deaths. This is a subtle way of creating a situation where Moore shows men abandoning their wives and the young, strong-willed daughter must come to the rescue and care for the mother. This happens several times which gets redundant and frustrating to read. Moore may have just titled this book "Pathetic Women who Hate Men" because this is the type of woman she writes about.