The Style and the Form of Junot Diaz in His Short Story Collection Down

"All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation - -it is the Self escaping into the open," so writes E.B. White in The Elements of Style. In Drown, the collection of short stories written by Junot Diaz, what escapes into the open are revealing glimpses not only into the Self, but the Self as gleaned through the refracted images of the immigrant experience in the United States. Diaz's style, at once simple and complex, propels these experiences in ten loosely-structured, semi-autobiographical tales of love, loss, abandonment, identity, hard-earned optimism, and belonging in the lives of Dominicans both in the Dominican Republic and the United States. His use of language, prose, and narrative shifts are bold, fresh, and inventive, giving depth and feeling to his tales in unexpected ways.

Language is everything. To a writer, it is an essential tool. But for the writer who is bilingual and living in a country where his native tongue is not the dominate language, it is also a means of self-identification. The characters that populate the ten stories in Drown straddle a fence between their native country in the Dominican Republic and their new home in the United States, constantly negotiating the terms in which they must identify with the dominant culture and their own. Language becomes the tie that binds them back to their past. In the stories, "Ysrael," "Aguantando," and "Fiesta, 1980," which relate to the narrator's early years on the Island and in New Jersey, Diaz liberally sprinkles the text with Spanish words as if they were spices in a pot, adding flavor and subtext to the whole.