Drown (short story collection)

This story was included in The Best American Short Stories, 1996. "Ysrael" tells the story of Yunior and his brother Rafa in the Dominican Republic searching for a neighborhood boy whose face was disfigured by a pig, causing him to wear a mask at all times.

This story is mostly about the narrator's father, a party at his aunt and uncle's, and his father's relationship with "the Puerto Rican woman".

This story discusses Lucero's life as a drug dealer and his romantic relationship with a heroin addict. Here, he dreams of having a normal life with Aurora, but her addiction presents major obstacles. This story focuses on the idea of love as something difficult to define. While the narrator hopes to have a normal relationship with Aurora, any semblance of normalcy is threatened by the characters' dangerous lifestyles.[5]

Yunior tells a series of anecdotes about his time living in Santo Domingo and his anticipation to hear from his father, who has left for the United States.

This story describes the narrator's alienation from a friend visiting from college. He retraces the final summer they spent together and the sexual experiences they had that the narrator is confused by. Often times the audience is left feeling contempt for the main character finding themselves indifferent about his self inflicted state of decay.

The story focuses on the narrator overhearing the ups and downs of a relationship between his two neighbors through the walls, and hoping to build up the courage to speak to the woman.

In Junot Diaz's "Edison," The text follows the day of a pool maintenance guy. It entails the process of his deliveries while serving wealthy people, all the while just recently getting out of a relationship with his ex. The narrator shares how through his deliveries, he would encounter all different types of people, those who are kind and others who stereotype and look down on the narrator and his coworker Wayne. In one specific delivery, the narrator and Wayne are ignored at the door and continue off with their work day. When returning to work, the narrator and Wayne learned that the unavailable client Pruitt was furious that his order was not delivered and quickly assumed the narrator and Wayne were delinquents. "The boss nearly kicked our asses over the Gold Crown. The customer, an asshole names Pruitt, called up crazy, we were delinquent. That's how the boss put it. Delinquent" (Diaz 129). The narrator shares the encounters and experiences he faces as a merchandise delivery boy, often being stereotyped for Wayne and his ethnic background as young criminals. Through this text, it can be seen the experiences that Diaz shares within the narrator's life, knowing and feeling the stereotype of his community, ethnicity, and background and living through that experience every day.

Alongside Pruitt was his guest, who ignored the narrator and Wayne when attempting their delivery. During their second attempt, both workers could finally enter and set up the ordered pool table. Through the narrator's encounter with the guest, the narrator decides to help Pruitt's guest and get her back home to New York. Throughout their interaction, it can be seen that the narrator expected "the girl" to have sexual relations with him. Although it was never discussed that her free ride came with a payment, the narrator assumed he could have sex with her anyway. This can be seen when the narrator takes one of Pruitt's condoms from his room before heading out to drop her off at home.

The story takes the guise of an instructional manual, purporting to offer advice as to how to act or behave depending upon the ethnicity and social class of the reader’s date.

This story tells of Ysrael from his own perspective and his anticipation regarding facial reconstruction surgery by Canadian doctors.

This story explains Yunior's father Ramon's arrival to the United States, first to Miami and then New York. Ramon struggles both financially and with the guilt of having left his family behind after he marries an American to obtain citizenship.

The book centers around an immigrant family from the Dominican Republic. First, Ramon comes to the United States searching for a better life for his family. He is often frustrated by how hard he works with little return and little wealth to show for it. Then, when his family joins him, they too try to find some balance between the American Dream and their reality. Ramon’s dream was to own his own business and provide for his family, which he achieves to a certain degree. But is doesn’t make him better or happier.

In both Santo Domingo and in New York, Diaz portrays tight-knit communities that are bound together by heritage and social class.

Drown is about a family that is forced to separate in order to immigrate to the U.S. and the strain that separation evokes as well as the irreparable damage their father creates by being unfaithful to his wife and abusive to his children.

Both Rafa and his father are with several women throughout the book and explore their sexuality outside of committed relationships. Yunior, however, struggles more with his sexuality and while he has a girlfriend at several points in the book, he also has a sexual experience with a man. In a conversation with Hilton Als, Junot explains that he is confounded by how little attention is paid to the homosexual experiences in this narrative when critics talk about the fictive world of Yunior De las Casas because it's fundamental to who he is as a character.[6]