Danny O’Hara

The Art of Fiction

Due 9/14/2016

Point of View Analysis

In “The Cheater’s Guide to Love”, by Junot Diaz, Diaz makes the interesting decision to write the story using a second person point of view. While the second person point of view is not seen often in literature due to it’s difficulty to master, Diaz presents the story beautifully, and the point of view allows the readers to empathize with a rather nasty individual.

The narrator, Yunior, is addressed sparingly throughout the story. Instead, Diaz writes as if he is speaking to you, and it makes the narrative much more potent. If it were a third person omniscient point of view, with feelings and thoughts being stated as facts, the character would be rather hard to like. He is crass, he treats women as if they’re objects, and he has a tendency to run away from issues and hardships. None of these are qualities that the typical reader looks for in characters, unless they get their comeuppance in the end. However, Yunior gets his comeuppance in the beginning, and we get to explore how he deals with that over a period of a few years. This is made much more personal by Diaz’s decision to use the second person point of view. The text reads as if Diaz is speaking to us, and about us. We get to experience Yunior’s mistakes, his faults, and his life on a much closer level. If we weren’t placed so closely to his thoughts, and his habits, then he would be much harder to sympathize with. Who cares if a cheater got caught? Why should I worry about his self-destructive tendencies if he refuses to learn from his past mistakes? Diaz realized that his narrator may be hard to connect to, so he speaks as if the reader is the one in the story. This enables the text to strike a chord with many readers. Someone may not usually care if a cheater gets caught, but that opinion changes quickly when the cheater, so to speak, is themselves.