The Stories of Junot Díaz: Genre and Narrative in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her

This thesis examines how Junot Díaz creates and constructs his literary alter-ego and narrator, Yunior de las Casas, and examines the Social and cultural aspects, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, that condition or influence Yunior’s construction. I argue that Díaz uses the short story as a subversive genre and modernist narrative techniques, such as shifts in space-time and focalization, to reflect Yunior’s diasporic, fragmented subjectivity. My analysis includes narratological and generic readings of Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, with a brief look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, paying particular attention to Yunior as narrator. Finally, this thesis traces Yunior’s construction and development through Junot Díaz’s narratives, and this mapping of Yunior’s identity explores race, ethnicity, masculinity, and gender as it relates to heteronormative dominicanidad