A Summary Of Yunior's Drown '

Yunior faces many challenges in the story Drown, he grows up without a father and is taken advantage of my many of the people closest to him. I believe that the collection of stories is titled “Drown” because of the immense pressure that Yunior feels throughout the story, almost like he is drowning. The title story Drown, takes place at a very important time in Yunior’s life, his best friend is leaving for college and this is really around the “coming of age” point in his life. Another interesting scene in the title story is when Beto holds Yunior under the water after he simply knows a word that Beto doesn’t know. The pool scene where Beto is holding Yunior under the water is a critical point in the story because alludes to how Yunior feels like he is drowning in his own life. From birth, Yunior feels submissive to people more powerful than him, like Rafa and his father. He feels like he is smaller than and inferior to everyone else. Before Yunior’s dad comes back into the picture, Rafa is the boss of him, Rafa orders him around every day and Yunior doesn’t have much of a say, simply because he is younger. He sees that his mother is sad about the “loss” of Papi, but Yunior could never be big enough to fill those shoes. He feels compressed by …show more content…
I believe that this draws parallels to the rest of Yunior’s life where he feels like he is drowning in his day to day life. This scene is so critical to the story because we feel the weight of everything on Yunior, and not just the weight of the water and Beto’s hands keeping him under the surface. “He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me under… He was stronger than me and held me down until water flooded my nose and throat,” (94). This is when he is an adolescent and it is a real “coming of age” point in the story. After this point in his life, he turns more heavily to drugs to cope with the feeling of