Finding Your Identity

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“Finding One’s Identity” “Drown,” a novel about Junot Diaz contains many short stories about events that have occurred in the narrator, Yunior’s life. Each story has leaps from his summer at camp, his life as a child, to his life as a grown-up who is pretty much on his own whether it is about his career or his love life. The theme of this story is finding one’s true identity and that is expressed by the character Ysrael in the story “No Face.” Ysrael may not be the main character as he is only mentioned in the beginning and towards the end of the novel, though, he holds a lot of significance as he does not have much of an identity himself and just like Ysrael, Yunior also does not have an identity of his own and his character changes throughout the novel due to the events that occur and how they make an impact on his life, such as Yunior’s brother, Rafa pulling the mask off of Ysrael, Yunior’s break-up with his girlfriends, and his father leaving them. Ysrael does not have an identity as it is hidden under a mask and Diaz has classified that in the beginning of the novel. As an infant, he is eaten by a pig. The narrator describes his look as, “His left ear was a nub and you could see the thick veined slab of his tongue through a hold in his cheek. He had no lips. His head was tipped back and his eyes had gone white and the cords were on his neck,” (18-19). Ysrael is also brought up in another short story within the book called “No Face”, as the whole story is about him from many years later and even then, not much has changed as far as his looks are concerned but he is much stronger and helpful towards his family. The narrator states, “Today he buys Kaliman, who takes no shit and wears a turban. If his face were covered, he’d be perfect. He has his power of INVISIBILITY and no one can touch him,” (155). Even after many years, the memory of the pig still haunts

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