29 pages 58 minutes read

Junot Díaz

How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1995

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Character Analysis

The Narrator

The narrator is the story’s protagonist. He exhibits analytical skills, quick thinking, and social awareness. He is a student, likely a teenager, and lives with his parents in a home with signs of government aid and slight disrepair. He spends most of the story going through extensive steps to date girls that live in or around his area. He is a dynamic character, and this dynamism as a character appears during every single encounter where the possibility of social faux pas or barriers between him and his romantic interests are present. He is the one example of a round character in the story because of how multifaced he is and because he possesses the ability to adapt under many of the scenarios that he encounters in the narrative. When he utters the phrase, “You have choices” (Paragraph 12), it encapsulates this idea.

The other origin of his character’s adaptability comes from the fact that he and his immediate family immigrated from the Dominican Republic. In terms of appearance, the story seems to suggest that he is likely of a light skinned complexion, not fair enough to be considered white.