Drown

Díaz uses the motif of failed relationships and/or emotionally- and physically-abusive ones, to mount a critique of masculinity from a distinct angle. Many of the men in these stories find themselves lost in grief over a failed romantic relationship with a woman. Many of them find ways to redirect and project their grief, rather than facing it head-on. That redirection usually manifests in sexist thinking about women, unfair or voyeuristic displacement of emotions onto unsuspecting women, or outright physical violence against women.

Through this recurring depiction, Díaz provokes reflection on the toxic dynamics of the masculine identity. He asks the reader to consider the ways in which women are objectified and instrumentalized by emotionally-stunted and inept men who, in their quest to enact an idealized masculinity, have been trained to squelch and repress their own emotional lives. These men, trapped by their own quest to attain masculinity, view women as the repositories of the angst that their own psychological machinations have prevented them from confronting. It is here that their dysfunctional ideas about romantic love are born, and everyone involved is forced to pay the price of that dysfunction. 

This prominent motif, most saliently embodied by Ramón, recurs throughout the collection, and is another vehicle for Díaz’s exploration of masculinity. Díaz trains his gaze on Ramón and his own personal struggle to chase after a masculinity marked by assimilation into whiteness and prosperous success in achieving the American Dream—one that consistently evades him. Ramon’s unflinchingly brutal treatment of Yunior in “Fiesta, 1980” can be understood as a desperate reaction against a system that has robbed him of achieving his own conception of full, idealized masculinity.

Ramon has displaced this sense of failure and chooses instead to pursue its cathartic resolution by duplicating the violences imposed on him and enacting them on his own defenseless son. The motif of the absent and abusive father figure is also explored from the perspective of the abandoned son, most fully through the character of Yunior, and his conflicted desire to love and be loved by a cold father who is both emotionally and physically absent. Díaz also teases out another conflict that is inherent to masculinity: the ambiguous and contentious mandate for a father to both love his sons and police a masculine identity within them—and the attendant mandate for a son to love and admire a toxic father.