Throughout Drown,
each character's relationships (more specifically narrator's relationships)
play a considerable role in how we, as readers, view them and how much we like
them/can relate to them. This is apparent both in the character's relationships
with their friends/family and in their relationships with their
girlfriends/boyfriends.
The first story, "Ysrael," gives
us Yunior as the narrator. Yunior has a good relationship with his family; he
loves his mother and looks up to his brother. This makes Yunior a likeable
character for the readers. He is even nice to Ysrael, who is basically a social
pariah, and tries to make friends with him and have a conversation. In
contrast, the characterization of Rafa that we get makes him a less likeable
character: he chases Ysrael and hits him with a glass bottle and he is pretty
mean to Yunior even though Yunior just wants to be like him.
In "Fiesta 1980," we meet the
character of Yunior and Rafa's father. For most of the story all we see him
doing in his interactions with Yunior, our narrator, is yelling at Yunior
because of his carsickness, and for various other reasons. Despite the last
scene in the story where the father and mother seem to be having a tender
moment together, Yunior's father is still not a vary likeable character and we
are left with bad taste in out mouth from his previous actions.
This trend continues in
"Aurora," where Lucero, our new narrator, seems to start out as a
fairly neutral character, he deals drugs, but he doesn't seem like too bad of a
person at first. Then we learn about his relationship with his on again, off
again girlfriend, Aurora. Their relationship is full of violence and more often
than not, Lucero's stories of her end with him regretting some violent act that
he committed "...and after a while I hit her and made the blood come out
of her ear like a worm...(65)" This makes him really unlikeable,
unrelatable character and paints "Aurora" in a different light.
Later in "Edison, New Jersey,"
our narrator is introduced as a kind of average lower class person, who
delivers pool tables and game tables to really rich people. As the story
progresses he is shown to be a funny character and already seems likeable. We
later learn that he has a habit of stealing from the rich people houses, which
is just as illegal as Lucero selling drugs. But he goes on to talk about why he
steals, that he does it for his girlfriend (or at least he did), to make sure
she had anything she wanted. This paints him in a more sympathetic light and
keeps him as a likeable character, in contrast to Lucero whose relationships
made him unlikeable, despite the similarities between them.
In the end, it’s really up to the reader's
to decide which narrators they like or dislike more. But it seems to me that
the relationships of the narrators and of the people that they interact with in
their stories play a major role in how they are viewed.
