When the narrator tells us that we are smarter than her because we decided to turn to a page she did not instruct us to turn to, reveals her excessive obedience towards her girlfriend. She wishes she could be like those who aren’t obedient , and instead decide to take risks and do things out of normality; She wishes to be like these people, but she isn’t. The narrator is someone who is scared to take risks and scared to get out the “vicious cycle” of her relationship; the cycle being that she accepts everything that her girlfriend does and says to her, without standing up for herself. This goes on and on and she does nothing to put a stop to it. If you chose to ignore her instructions, and decided to read her novel your own way, what you are doing is claiming back your power, and not letting yourself be controlled by someone else. Something that the narrator has yet to do herself. Therefore, we as readers, are smart for not listening to her rules. It is evident that the narrator wishes she wouldn’t obey and follow her girlfriend all the time, there is always something holding her back from doing this. I think it is because she simply wants to love and be loved by someone, since it is so hard to find this a queer woman.

What we see here is the narrator staying in a relationship with someone she knows she should not be with anymore. After a hectic day driving back from the Harvard- Yale football game, a drive where they kept fighting and yelling with each other, the narrator decides not to sleep as soon as they get home. She says that if she sleeps then she will just forget what happened this day, so she stays up all night because she wants to remember; she wants to remember everything that the girlfriend told her, she wants to remember her calling her a “selfish bitch”, and she wants remember that she could have died because of her. Therefore, she doesn't want to push this memory in the back of her head because she wants to give herself a reason to leave. However, when she says “ and as though you’d slept, a new day begins again”, it is evident that she chose to forget everything about that drive back even though she did not sleep it off. This just comes to show how hard it is to leave toxic relationships, people just choose to stay because they do not have the power nor strength to leave. They would much rather stay and forget, than to leave and remember. Hence why the title of this chapter is called River Lethe. In Greek mythology, this was a river of forgetfulness, which implies that just like this river the narrator wants to forget that she is a verbally abusive woman.

When the girlfriend states, “you're not allowed to write about this”, the first thing that came to my mind was Yunior. Yunior was in the process of writing a book, “This is How you Lose her” as seen in the chapter “Alma”. So, I believe that the narrator may also be in the process of writing a book and that is why she wants to make it clear that she does not to be written about. The fact that this girlfriend does not want to be written about already shows us that she knows that she is in the wrong; she knows that if this fight were to be written about, she is going to look like a crazy, obsessive person, who is mad at her girlfriend for simply being a kind person; a major red flag in a relationship. It is also a major red flag that she is silencing her; she wants to control her story and wants to make sure that nothing bad is written about her; however, it is not her story to tell and she has no right to do that. The whole point of this novel, “In the DreamHouse” is to finally speak for those that have never been able to, and to speak what has always been hidden. For instance; this abusive relationship. So, in including this story she is breaking the norm and showing people the secrets that have never been talked about.

What we see going on with Yunior here is what Gloria Anzaldua terms the Coatlicue state. Yunior is essentially in this state because he is trying to escape the shame he feels for cheating on his fiance, and does this by picking up a new hobby, running. The Coatlicue state is a very toxic state to be in however, because it restrains him from feeling, from feeling any pain or any sadness about his ex. In allowing yourself to feel this pain and to come to terms with it, is the only way to truly move forward, so picking up hobbies is not going to help him successfully move on. That is why I think that life did not allow him to continue running , it is said that he felt pain in his right foot which turned out to be plantar fasciitis. Getting this diagnosis made him stop running, so he tried other hobbies, which we see never work out for him. This was a sign that he needed to release this Coatlicue, and embrace the pain, and “take matters into [his] own hands” (Anzaldua 73). I am not sure whether he fully released the Coatlicue state at the end of the novel, but it is evident that he is starting to because he starts writing about his story to get through it.

After reading “The Silence”, we learn that the rape that Junot Diaz experienced traumatized him to the point where he felt like was not a “real Dominican man because real Dominican men do not get raped”. Therefore, to reclaim what he thinks should be his identity we can see that he took on the role of the stereotypical Dominican man and got into sexual relations with many girls, as the character of “Yunior”. He says that Dominicans are known to be “sucios”, so this was the perfect identity to take on, one that would make him fit in with everyone and make what happened to him go away. However, as we can see on this page, the memory does not go away. As much as he and essentially, the character of “Yunior”, try to pretend that he is a “sucio” like every other man, the “bomb blows NYC" as he dreams of touching his girlfriend. The “bomb” is meant to signify the horrible memory of the rape, destroying him inside while he attempts to have sexual thoughts on Paloma. But it is evident that the memory of the rape is more powerful than his fantasy dreams; it is a bomb that is waiting to go off any minute to remind him that he is the victim of rape. What he needs to do is reclaim his identity in another way, he needs to embrace his trauma to truly move forward and be the little kid that he was before he got hurt. Writing that piece in the New Yorker, is one step closer he is to getting to that point.

According to Gloria Anzaldua, there are only three directions that a woman part of a Latino culture can turn to, “church as a nun, streets as a prostitute, or home as a mother” (39). For this reason, we see Yunior’s mother cooking and then merely “waiting to wash the dishes” throughout this chapter. She does this because she has no choice but to take the responsibility of a stay at home mother now that her husband is in their lives again. In this culture, as well as in the Western culture, women have always been expected to submit to men and accept the “value system of the men”, making women essentially their servant . Because Yunior’s father believes that she, Rafa, and Yunior have to stay in the house, that is what she is seen doing; submitting to her husband's request. However, it is interesting that it says here that, back on the “island”, where the husband was not present, she had been the one in authority. So, this dichotomy of power is only limited to a heterosexual relationship, meaning woman have the ability to take charge and be as responsible as a man.