Yunior's Insecurities Regarding His Image

Narrative style plays a huge role in the story "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" from Junot Diaz's Drown. The distinguishing feature that makes this story so different from the others in the collection is that it is written in the second person, constantly using the imperative mood throughout. Our narrator is once again Yunior, and the story progresses as he discloses to the reader his step-by-step process on what to do when on a date with a girl, based off 2 main things: her race and her location. Yunior proceeds to explain to the reader the different scenarios that might occur with each permutation of race and location, starting when his family leaves all the way to later in the night, when the girl finally leaves, and tells the reader, using imperative, and how to handle each of them to ensure the optimal outcome of the date. Yunior is very methodical and critical about this process, but his vast knowledge doesn't appear to be very natural in the story. Instead it appears rehearsed, almost as if Yunior had sat down and memorized what to do in each and every situation so that when the time came for another date, he would be fully prepared and not have to worry over a lapse of mind. Ironically, it is this vast knowledge of dating that results in the notion that Yunior is actually overall insecure about himself while dating. While Yunior appears to put on this facade of confidence while dating, his obsessive habit of planning out what to do in every situation, depending on a girl's race and location, show that Yunior is above else worried about his image and that he will mess up. By memorizing all these different scenarios and through the use of second person, Yunior is able to minimize mistakes and hide these worries while dating, which only proves to accentuate his insecurities overall.

We can observe Yunior's insecurities about his image by observing his obsessive and perfectionist behavior on the very first page of the story. Yunior waits to have girls over until his entire family is gone and he has the house to himself, already establishing that he feels too insecure and embarrassed to have the girls he brings over meet his family. Quickly after his mom leaves, Yunior rushes to rearrange the house: "Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girl's from the Terrace stack the boxes behind the milk. If she's from the Park or Society Hill hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, way up where she'll never see" (143). Yunior has a unique scenario on what to do with the cheese in his refrigerator depending on where the girl is from. Already we see Yunior putting to use his expertise on women based on location, as he knows exactly where to move the cheese depending on where the girl is from. The fact that Yunior is bothering with moving something as trivial as cheese from the refrigerator in the first place, even if it is from the government, in itself shows how obsessive he is about protecting his image. He thinks that a girl seeing that he is living on welfare must be prevented at all costs, as it could soil his reputation early into the date, even if that means moving the government cheese out of sight of the refrigerator. The fact that he memorized exactly where to move it based on the girl's location simply shows the extent to which Yunior will go to preserve his image. A similar notion of Yunior's obsession for perfection appears when he is waiting for his date to arrive: "The directions were in your best handwriting, so her parents won't think you're an idiot. Get up from the couch and check the parking lot [...] Wait and after an hour go out to your corner" (144). Yunior again is primarily concerned about his image to the parents at the beginning of this scene, as he is depicted writing as best as he can to impress them. When his date doesn't show up on time he checks several times and is clearly concerned, but when she finally shows up later in that scene, he quickly tries to put up facade of coolness by unsuccessfully running his hand through his hair.

Interestingly, even though the story is written in the second person, and it appears that Yunior is simply throwing the reader into a date and providing he or she with several different scenarios, it almost has the opposite effect of making Yunior himself look even more insecure. We can draw an important connection here between this story and several stories of Lorrie Moore's characteristic second person narration style. The difference with this story is that the word "you" seems to appear a lot less than it does in any Lorrie Moore story. Instead, it is replaced with a multitude of imperatives that on the surface are simply telling the reader what he or she is doing in the story. At first, this simply seems like a nuanced form of the second person writing style, but upon further inspection we can observe that this is not the case. The specific imperatives that Yunior uses include short, two-word phrases such as "be prepared," "stay alert," and "don't panic". While these imperatives do appear in a second person context, several of them take the form of reassuring phrases. The lack of prevalence of the word "you" and instead increased frequency of these short imperative commands give a feeling that the reason Yunior doesn't use "you" as much as Moore is because a lot of the advice he is offering through these imperative commands he is actually speaking to himself. It's as if Yunior is giving himself a pep-talk to reassure himself to "be prepared" and "don't panic" during different times of the date. We already observed how obsessive Yunior is when it comes to memorizing and playing out all the different scenarios depending on the race of a girl or her location, and keeping in mind something like this it isn't unreasonable to assume that Yunior isn't just speaking his directions and advice to the reader, but also to himself. This notion that Yunior uses the second person and knowledge of every scenario to cover up his insecurities culminates well with what he narrates with the whitegirl where we finally see the full extent of Yunior's insecurities about his image: "Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own" (147).