Old Habits Die Hard

The character of Yunior in Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her, while different in some respects, remains relatively constant throughout all of the books. In each case, he is a Dominican man who spent his young life in the Dominican Republic and moved with his family to the United States as a child. Each story, he has an absentee father who shows up later in his life, a mother, and a brother named Rafa. However, it's not just the situations that Yunior is placed in that remain the same; certain aspects of Yunior's character are maintained throughout all three books.

Each Yunior is a distinct person, despite all of the similarities; they lead different lives and have different levels of success and overall happiness, yet some factors remain constant. The most important character trait that Yunior maintains throughout all of the books is his tendency to fall back on his old habits. This is displayed constantly in his inability to stick with anything, no matter how well things are going. Since he was raised with Dominican masculine ideals, Yunior tends to fall back hardest on the habits instilled by this upbringing, particularly cheating on his partners. All three Yuniors cheat excessively on their girlfriends, even the more redeemable Yunior of Oscar Wao. At the end of the novel, he says that he doesn't "run around after girls anymore. Not much anyway", right after describing his wife as a woman "whom I do not deserve" (Diaz 326). Despite his stability and happiness, Yunior is still willing to risk it all to keep up his old habit of cheating. In each book, Yunior cheats on at least one girlfriend, from Aurora in Drown to Magda in This Is How You Lose Her, despite his relative happiness in both relationships; cheating is just a habit that he cannot break.

Yunior also is complicit with cheating in each story. Despite the fact that his conscience knows its wrong, the Yunior in Drown "didn't talk much about the Puerto Rican woman", though his mother and aunt specifically ask him about his father's actions (Diaz 39). He understands how wrong his father's cheating is, yet refuses to bring it up because he was raised to keep silent about such matters, and this willing silence can be seen in all three books.

Finally, in each book, Yunior abuses some sort of substance, typically alcohol or marijuana. He turns to these substances in upsetting situations, such as after a breakup or when Rafa is dying. In This Is How You Lose Her, his depression after breaking up with his fiance is so bad that on Thanksgiving he managed to "drink [himself] into a stupor, spend two days recovering" (Diaz 183). The similar thing about all of the habits that Yunior falls back on is that they are harmful to him; the cheating makes him lose the people he cares about the substance abuse makes him unhappy, and in This Is How You Lose Her, suicidal and very sick. So why does Yunior keep his old, detrimental habits up? Perhaps it is because people always try to go back to what they know and understand. Because he was raised in the way that he was, Yunior seems to understand cheating and heavy drinking as ways to get rid of stress and make it all better. Despite his conscience telling him that his actions are wrong, Yunior cannot quit himself of these tendencies because old habits die hard.