Theme Of Facelessness In Richard Diaz's Drown

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Drown is a collection of ten short stories loosely connected by the theme of adolescent boys to young adults in rough neighborhoods of both the Dominican Republic and Dominican barrios in New Jersey. These characters have the common struggle of facing poverty in their lives, which later on leads to drugs, violence and crimes. The characters Diaz portrays make no excuses and do not want to immerse themselves in self-pity. The world they live in is all they have ever known, and they all live in the moment. There are several recurrent themes running through this collection such as, the lost father, the regained father, the lost love, brotherhood, betrayal and the one I found most striking was that of facelessness. Common belief would view facelessness related with invisibility, but in the book Drown, it is not. There is something within this facelessness, which makes the person all the more visible, real, pitied, hated, feared, and by some, treated with great kindness. Those who are “faced” want the “faceless” to be gone for good because they represent the fear that they will also one day suffer this fate where all that defines a person to the outside world is stripped away. They fear to be in a position where they are unloved and unlovable. In the story, Ysrael represents no face; most of his face was chewed off by a…show more content…
There is something strong deep within him that will keep him alive despite the obstacles. He is a survivor. Ysrael symbolizes the best hope of all who are “faceless” within the collection of stories within the book. The simple message is to continue moving forward no matter how people will try to conceal the reality of the

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