Antagonist

Character Role Analysis

The Sensation of "Otherness"

If you are having trouble identifying an antagonist in this novel, we feel you. It's so much easier to identify a bad guy when he or she is a) an obvious evil mastermind trying to foil the hero with all the weapons at his or her disposal, or b) suave and British. Unfortunately, Alvarez does not make things easy on us. Her narrative is way more complicated than that.

Sure, there are characters in this novel that do bad things. There's a terrifying child predator. There's a whole handful of Americans who hurl insults at the García family and tell them they're not welcome. There are super scary soldiers from the Secret Police. But none of these characters are major enough to encompass all of the antagonism in the novel. These guys are small potatoes.

But what really affects these girls is the horrible sensation of being treated like an outsider, an Other. How bad does it feel when you feel like you belong exactly nowhere? Hint: Kind of like being "trapped inside a wreck, calling for help" (1.1.62).

So the Antagonist of this story isn't a character, an historical event, or an environment. It's the fragmented experience of being forced to choose a Dominican identity or an American one… and then having both Dominicans and Americans reject you.