Yunior as a Double-Edged Sword

Throughout Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior vacillates between being a likeable young man caught in the crossfires between his inevitable Dominican masculinity and his revulsion with the world and people he came from. In Drown, Yunior is especially likeable when he talks about how all he wanted was to play with Rafa, but Rafa ignored him during the year until they got to their relative’s house in the summer. Drown’s Yunior seems like a helpless child, between getting abused by his father, ignored by his mother and brother, uncomfortable in front of girls and his extended family, and vomiting every time he enters his father’s car. This more vulnerable Yunior as a young boy makes him a more likeable and complex character than many other men we encounter in Drown. In a similar manner, the Yunior in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao seems quite likeable. Personally, I though Yunior’s shining moment here was when he decides to take Oscar running in an effort to get him in better shape. Now although this was an effort to change someone who didn’t really want it, I thought that in this scene Yunior seemed like he really cared about Oscar and was finally standing up for the both of them, for once. To me, Yunior’s efforts to help Oscar made him an immensely more likeable man than the one we previously knew. In addition, the Yunior of This is How You Lose Her is also more likeable than some other Dominican males we met previously. In this work, Yunior is frightened at Rafa’s sickness, and does everything he can to keep Rafa home and healthy. He always defends Rafa in front of their mother and tries to rescue Rafa at the moments when he cannot save himself. Again, this Yunior, as the vulnerable, scared baby brother, is a more sympathetic character than the other versions of Yunior we have met.
However, Yunior always seems to do something (most often involving women) to mess up his own likeability. In Drown, Yunior’s dalliances with Aurora make him seem like any typical Dominican male: mean, misogynistic, and careless of all other people. His drug dealing and abusive treatment of Aurora are irreconcilable with the boy who vomited in the VW and only craved his father’s love. Furthermore, Yunior in Oscar Wao also has his ugly moments. Yunior always states that his intentions were good, but between his treatment of Lola and his apathy for Oscar after the suicide attempt make this hard to believe. It’s fine for Yunior to say he had good intentions, but his lack of actual action makes him quite unlikeable. Finally, in This is How You Lose Her, Yunior’s last chapter seems to demolish any likeability he had previously constructed. To begin, the chapter is titled “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” Yunior is still bumbling his way through life, cheats on the girl he loves the most, and then tries to make himself feel better by trying to sleep with everything that walks his way. He acts like a typical Dominican male, with no respect for women, only bemoaning his own fate. Again, this Yunior is immensely unlikeable. In each Diaz work, Yunior is torn between the two edges of his identity, often uncomfortable with his Dominican reputation and culture but never able to escape it, and thus we are torn between liking and sympathizing with Yunior and discarding him as a typical Dominican male.