Junot Díaz

Junot Diaz’s book This Is How You Lose Her provides an insightful look into the experiences of love and loss, mostly through the eyes of its narrator, Yunior. Within this collection are stories of Yunior’s infidelity and the relationships of those around him; this includes tales of his family’s struggles with their respective partnerships. There is a subtle but evident shift in Yunior’s attitude as these stories progress, turning him into a more rounded character. Though greatly flawed, Yunior’s…

one’s “future self”, as in Star Wars between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Van Yperen describes Darth Vader as a villain because Luke can see himself someday turning out like his father. The concept of the “future self” can also be applied to Junot Diaz’s work, “Fiesta, 1980.” Nathaniel Van Yperen defines a villain as someone that a hero could eventually become—if they make bad decisions. It becomes clear that villains are usually regular human beings who just made some bad decisions…

In the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz introduces terms and beliefs that come from Dominican culture before delving into these experiences of Oscar, Lola, Belli, Yunior, and others. One of the more essential terms introduced by Diaz is this idea of fukú. Simply, fukú is this bad luck that exists not only for one individual, but it is bad luck that is passed down through generations. Diaz initially introduces this term in-text through our narrator, Yunior, as “a curse or doom of some…

Love is a feeling that forever makes humankind crazy and fall over its heels. There is a natural sense in every human to look for a soul mate, a partner, an other half. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, love leads to the tragedies each plot encounters. While The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao focuses on a fat Dominican teenager named Oscar trying to find love, The Great Gatsby focuses on a new rich man trying to alter an…

Junot Diaz, in his book “Drown” explores the struggle of Dominican Republic immigrants in the United States to achieve the American Dream. Each story is related, but is separate vignette, each with its own title. The novel does not follow a traditional story arc but rather each story captures a moment in time. Drown is narrated by and educated adult and set mostly in the 1980s with much of the narrative occurring in the narrators childhood. In this essay I will talk about how the immigrant life…

models of relationship. Some demonstrate harmonious interactions while others tell about partners’ problems. Stories, which will be analyzed in this essay, are referred to the last category. Both The Eye of the Night by Karla Suarez and Aurora by Junot Diaz tell about unhappy, futureless relations; but authors highlight different reasons for these conditions. In the first case problems were caused because of lack of communication and common interests between partners. Relations of characters in…

of them, struggle, disappointments and a discriminative society which opts to out rightly ignore them is what they have to face each day. This paper seeks to discuss the immigrants experience in America based on the stories, Edison, New Jersey by Junot Diaz and A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf by Lara Vapnayar. There exist differences as to how the immigrants in the stories came to America. First, Nina relocated to America out of an obligation to her husband who wanted to move to America.…

can overcome evil and create a happy ending. It is reasonable to say that love seems to be the main underlying goal that we all strive in our lifetime. Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her presents us with a unique perspective on the topic of love. A typical human would always want a relationship and not stopping from loving each other. However, Diaz suggests that relationships do not always work that way. Cheating and betrayal seems to be the main issue of the novel, but it is love that…

stories since the 1970’s. While the cover is nothing too impressive, I noticed that out of the fifty total works, only approximately three or four appeared to be written by authors of color. The story that caught my attention was “Fiesta 1980” by Junot Diaz. I have not read many stories, written in English, by authors of Dominican descent. Getting a different perspective piqued my interest. In addition…

The parallel between revenge and justice is evident in many cases especially those pertaining to violence. For instance, in Junot Diaz’s essay, The Money, Diaz takes revenge against one of his friends when he realizes that they broke into his parent’s apartment and stole money and other personal belongings (142). Upon finding out that his friend burglarized their home, Diaz took matters into his own hands and retaliated by breaking into his friends home in order to retrieve the items taken (142)…