Drown By Junot Diaz Analysis

Family Matters The stories “Drown” by Junot Diaz and “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker both are stories that touch on incredibly sensitive issues with the human condition. On one hand, you’ve got a story about a woman, Dee, consciously choosing to leave her heritage and family behind due to her lofty ideals. In the other hand, you’ve got a young male narrator who’s an impoverished Dominican boy struggling with the pressure of having to financially take care of his mother in a new country. It seems that both of these stories describe different hardships with relationships and their loved ones. However, I believe that their conflicts arise from the same root cause – adjusting to living in a new society. In the story “Everyday Use” Dee or “Wangero” as she renamed herself, seems to treat her family like co-workers. Alice Walker writes about a discussion between Dee “Wangero,” Mama, and Maggie regarding ownership of a bunch of heirloom quilts. Dee seems to think that Maggie has always taken life for granted and that the word “no” is not one of her learned concepts. I find that Dee “Wangero” was contradicting herself when she claims she deserves the quilts because of her heritage when in fact
This boy narrates his own precarious adolescent life with an absent father and a tired mother. In the second to last paragraph of the short story, Junot Diaz writes about the narrator spending time relaxing with his mother. He writes, “Almost immediately her eyelashes begin to tremble, a quiet semaphore, she is dreaming, dreaming of Boca Raton, of strolling under the jacarandas with my father. You can’t be anywhere forever, was what Beto used to say, what he said to me the day I went to see him off. He handed me a gift, a book, and after he was gone I threw it away didn’t even bother to open it and read what he’d