A Cheaters Guide to Love

A Cheater’s Guide to Love

A Cheater’s Guide to Love is a short story authored by Junot Diaz. It focuses on Yuno’s personal life as a successful college professor (external conflict) and writer struggling through his romantic relationships (internal conflict). Often, the writer breaks out of first-person narration to address his audience directly. Diaz has a unique trait of confidence that flatters the readers. Yunor de las Casas’ voice is peppered with slang and profanity. The protagonist’s journey closely mirrors that of his creator, given his movements from Santo Domingo to Harvard University halls. His seamless and artistic code-switching technique between English and Spanish languages ensures smooth passage of his message to the intended audience (Leech et al., 2013). Diaz employs Yunior’s character to explore and resolve personal conflicts that ensue due to intersections between loss and love, desire and displacement as experienced by immigrants in the United States.

Direct Address

In the initial passages of the story, Yunior interrupts the narrative description to address the reader directly—“Your girl catches you cheating..." (Diaz 2012).  A technique like this conceives a sense of intimacy besides foregrounding the author's ability to write while targeting a specified reader. In this case, Diaz focuses on gaining the attention of a reader that experiences life as he has, through instances of rejections, loneliness, and engagement in promiscuity .Yunior navigates some of the figurative and literal boundaries that once confined him in the past. However, as the story unfolds, the main character remains defined by the legacy he has coined from his formative experiences.

Illogical Progress of the Story

A Cheater’s Guide to Love capture Diaz’s connection between the present and the past. In a stylistic manner hardly replicable in a story, the writer notes down the link between his becoming and being. It is closely portrayed in Yunior’s life rendered in fragments. The character's present is always past because the events in the short story unfold in patterns and cycles rather than novelistic resolution and progression. In fact, this aesthetic choice of literary style can function as a social critique (Ohmann, 2014). While a story is supposed to progress logically in a narrative form, Diaz's A Cheater’s Guide to Love disrupts the social narrative of progress shaping the reader’s understanding and knowledge of the immigrant experience in the United States. The story contains moments of success and triumph such as when Yunior finds love, or when the protagonist escapes a dangerous life of a drug dealer to study literature. However, several instances of hope are immediately accompanied by betrayal, illness, or lock-up. Cycles of oppression, mistrust, and break up often challenge the validity of the United States as a land of opportunity.

A Cheater’s Guide to Love entails Diaz telling his story through Yunior. However, his voice multiplies and mutates from pseudo-omniscient narration in the initial paragraphs to sparse first-person perspective like when he says “When can I run again?” social progress narratives are challenged by the use of fragmented story structure (Diaz, 2012). The author’s amorphous approach to character traits is a direct challenge to the boundaries of socially constructed identities between women and men.

Abusive Language

Violence permeates Diaz’s A Cheater’s Guide to Love throughout the short story. He portrays violence through Yunior as a means to define men, to defend their dominance and claims to power. The main character wields an evident emotional violence against females. In the story, he cheats on multiple occasions, he deceives honest women that are serious about establishing a lasting relationship, and eventually, he emerges as a loser of every female he falls in love with. Furthermore, Yunior uses abusive language to reduce females to disposable desire objects. Use of demeaning terms such as ‘sluts’, and ‘bitches’ is a testament to protagonist’s gender insensitivity and disregard for women’s welfare. Yunior’s brother and father are sources of his foul language and a hateful consideration of women.

The main character lives in an environment where men view women as mere objects of pleasure and inferior beings. Specifically, he exhibits an open bias against the women of color, stating that they join Harvard to “get pregnant” (Diaz 2012), unlike white or Asian women. Yunior is convinced that a man cannot gain respect and love if he does not turn violent and hateful towards others. His view is in sharp contrast to the reality. He not only betrays himself but also the women he loves. His betrayal in costs him sanity, health, and will to live.

Masculinity

The story highlights the role of a male artist like Juno Diaz in feminist struggle for recognition, equality and entitlement of rights. The author is aware of his alignment to feminism as he draws masculine maps of privilege. The nature of language violence evokes reader’s negative emotions. Still, Diaz tracks various ways that violence revolve through physical and emotional displacement across distinct generations. He locates the origin of abusive language in formative character experience.

Liminality and limbo are two most common themes in Diaz’s short story. The author attempts to negotiate conflicting tensions that are embedded deeply in his identity.  Aesthetically, A Cheater’s Guide to Love paints the conflicting tensions in the life of the protagonist. The author has a remarkable talent for combing graceful and poetic prose with colloquialisms, Spanish phrases, and street slang. The shifting forms and registers of narrative address unite as palimpsest layers, thus immersing the reader deeply into Yunior’s day-to-day life. Therefore, the short story is infused with melancholy, heartbreak, and gritty realism (Van, 2009).

The existing tension between redemption and depravity in A Cheater’s Guide to Love creates an interesting dynamic that captures the reader's attention. It demonstrates the author's advanced creativity and imagination. There is a detailed description of one of the main character’s worst breakups and eventual consequences of its aftermath.  At long last, Yunior rediscovers his enthusiasm for art and writing after half a decade of multiple personal failures and depression.  His description of this moment is captivating and exhaustive, thus enabling the reader to picture the situation and to relate to Yunior’s evolving personality.

Epiphany

The short story spans for more than five years, but most importantly, it traces the narrator’s subsequent relationships that vary in length after initial breakup. As the book nears its end, the narrator attains epiphany—he immediately realizes that all women in his life are human beings that deserve to be treated with respect and honor, just like he does. After a long period of suffering, Yunior finally gains a true human understanding and imaginary. It is a pivotal achievement for a person of his caliber because average socialized men hardly view women as equals. Therefore, his internal and external conflicts are resolved.

The author banks on the characters in his story to balance infidelity, cruelty, abuse, and other less palatable qualities by brandishing the force of their voices to a strong effect. A complexity like this is appealing to readers that can closely relate to the author’s and Yunior’s personalities (Van, 2009). The story carries a dark ferocity because of distinct types of love portrayed. Even though the ending of the story falls flat, Diaz’s voice-driven and minimalist writing skills and style are exemplified sufficiently in A Cheater’s Guide to Love. He reveals a perplexing and complex web of family, friendship and labor.

            The story’s content bears a checklist style content that sums up the entire book. In fact, it is a self-reflection of the narrator’s life history. It becomes increasingly clear that no matter how he intends to escape the vicious cycle, dark shadows of his former actions drags him back. Ultimately, he concludes that “…in a lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get” (Diaz, 2012).  It is an exceptional and stylistic ending for a story that refers the reader back to the beginning besides exposing the protagonist’s regrets .The author injects twists in the story to ensure that the reader falls under his spell as seduced by Yunior’s openly human quest for a reformed lifestyle despite a flawed past.

            In summary, A Cheater’s Guide to Love exposes the author’s chauvinistic traits. Diaz curves his lifestyle around a Yunior by employing a violent and abusive language to pass his intended message across. Most importantly, there is the protagonist experiences epiphany towards the end of the story that helps to resolve his and align his internal and external conflicts. Use of the first person in the narrative establishes a bond between the author and the readers. On the other hand, simplistic style applied guarantees a deeper understanding of the short story.

References

Díaz, J. (2012). A Cheater’s Guide to Love. London: Faber & Faber.Print.

Leech, G. N., & Short, M. (2007). Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (No. 13). New York: Pearson Education.Print.

Ohmann, R. (2014). Generative Grammars and the Concept of Literary Style.Word, 20(3), 423-439.

Van, T. T. M. (2009). The Relevance of Literary Analysis to Teaching Literature in the EFL Classroom. In English Teaching Forum (Vol. 47, No. 3, p. 2). US Department of State. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Office of English Language Programs, SA-5, 2200 C Street NW 4th Floor, Washington, DC 20037.