Genre Blog: Drown

The short story that I chose to write about in this blog is titled “Drown,” by Junot Diaz. I chose this one because it was really interesting to me and it is the easiest to dig into. I feel like the strongest theme or trait of this story is sexuality. I think the main character, Yunior, is struggling to find himself, especially when it comes to his sexuality.

I feel like this for a number of reasons. It all started when his mother tells him that his best friend from when he was younger is home from college. Right away Yunior mentions that, “he is a pato now but two years ago we were best friends,” (1). Pato is slang for a gay man, as if that was important for us to know about him. He then goes on to use other offensive words like “fag” to describe gay men. Not thinking anything about this, you continuing to read on.

The narrator brings us back to their last summer together before Beto moves to college. As we get towards the end of the story, there’s a paragraph that literally just says, “Twice. That’s it,” (7). And the next page or two goes into detail about the two times that Beto, the best friend, had touched him sexually and that he didn’t stop him. As the third time is about to happen and he hears someone outside the room, he freaks out and tells Beto that enough is enough. It’s almost as if, the thought of getting caught doing what they were doing scared him or embarrassed him so much.

As a reader, you can’t help but get the sense of shame and embarrassment from him as he calls it quits with Beto. He becomes very distant in the next few weeks before Beto leaves for college and when Beto gives him a book right before he leaves, Yunior just throws it away without even reading or looking at it. This all points to the fact that, he’s not really sure what happened to them and their friendship and that he doesn’t want to accept it. He can’t quite come to terms with it. This is now a factor into why he does what he does. He puts on this “tough guy” persona, he deals drugs, no one really knows that he can actually read and is pretty smart. As you can see, this is large theme in this short story among others like family, abandonment, secrets, etc. There’s so much information to be interpreted in this story.