Perspective in Drown

I find many parallels between this course and one I am taking through the religious studies department.  This week in that class a philosophy of Slavoj Žižek was presented in which he claims there is a fundamental issue with how intellectuals go about solving problems.  This issue regards how intellectuals often neglect the fact that how society poses the problem can be a part of the problem.  He goes on to say, in a convoluted and incredibly confusing way, that a true intellectual must look at an issue in its totality in the most objective way possible.  This idea is addressed through the way Diaz compiled the short stories in Drown.    

For the large majority of the novel, the reader experiences the world solely through Yunior’s perspective.  Because of this, many of the other characters in these stories became one-dimensional in the mind of the reader.  This single dimensionality of everyone but Yunior helps Diaz convey the gender roles and the importance of masculinity in the Dominican Republic.  For example, the role of the woman is to take care of her children and keep her husband happy.  When it becomes obvious Mami has not fulfilled her role as a woman, she stops functioning properly and becomes a “volcanic” member of the household.  In addition, anyone who functions as a threat to Yunior’s family unit, or what remains of it, is also depicted as primarily evil throughout a large majority of the novel.

This one-dimensional depiction of other characters changes entirely in the final chapter Negocios.   The reader acquires insight into the situation of Yunior’s father Ramón and discovers he is not necessarily the apathetic deserter Yunior, Rafa, and Mami believe him to be.  He has made sub-par, but honest attempts at creating a life for his “original” family in the United States.  The concept of multiple perspectives is perpetuated during the scene in which Yunior goes to speak with Nilda, his father’s American wife, after his father has left the family for good.  In this scene, Diaz gets close to explicitly explaining why the novel is organized in such a way that the audience does not receive the father’s perspective until the very end, “We sat and drank and finally talked, two strangers reliving an event—a whirlwind, a comet, a war—we’d both seen but from different faraway angles” (Diaz, 207).  This moment shows Žižek’s philosophy cannot be applied to literature; there is no way in which a story can be presented purely objectively.  People’s perspectives are shaped by where they are from, the culture they exist in, the language they speak, the religions they exercise, and much more, making each person’s life an individual and unique experience.  I think we will see this idea of perspective carry over into Diaz’s later works as well.