Confession plays a crucial yet ambivalent role in Junot Díaz’s fiction and paratexts. While scholarship has emphasized confession as a powerful means of witnessing male misbehavior, the #MeToo era urges readers to question who or what, beyond mere representation, confession serves. I suggest that protagonist Yunior’s compulsive confessions of lying, cheating and womanizing in This is How You Lose Her (2012) expose how his sense of self is split between an authoritarian Dominican past and an oppressive US present. Yunior’s macho behavior conjures the historical specter of Dominican strongman dictator, Trujillo, while his confessions make readers complicit in his immorality, echoing Trujillo’s manipulation of information for control. Forging this uneasy textual intimacy between reader and narrator further underscores mainstream expectations, in the US present, that minority writers “confess” their intimate lives for entertainment, conscribing how and what they express. Yet Yunior’s narrative also conscribes female representation by centering—and then absolving—male misbehavior through a confession that looks like a dialogue (addressing “you”) but in fact functions as a monologue. I also interrogate Díaz’s authorial interviews and apply Lili Loofbourow’s idea of the “male self-pardon” to Díaz’s autobiographical essay “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” (2018), in which he reveals surviving childhood sexual assault and confesses that he subsequently “hurt” intimate female partners. I argue that confession—whether Yunior’s or Díaz’s—perpetuates a masculine monologue that marginalizes women’s voices. Masculine confessions reach for intimacy but fail when they cannot imagine women as fully as men.

中文翻译：

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“让我忏悔”：Junot Díaz 的忏悔、同谋和#MeToo 这就是你失去赫兰德的方式“沉默：童年创伤的遗产”

忏悔在朱诺·迪亚兹的小说和副文本中扮演着重要而矛盾的角色。虽然学术强调忏悔是目睹男性不当行为的有力手段，但#MeToo 时代敦促读者质疑忏悔服务于谁或什么，而不仅仅是代表。我建议主角尤尼奥在《这就是你如何失去她》（2012）中对撒谎、欺骗和女性化的强迫性忏悔揭示了他的自我意识是如何在独裁的多米尼加过去和压迫性的美国现在之间分裂的。尤尼奥的大男子主义行为让人联想到多米尼加强人独裁者特鲁希略的历史幽灵，而他的自白让读者成为他不道德的同谋，呼应了特鲁希略为控制而操纵信息。在读者和叙述者之间建立这种令人不安的文本亲密关系进一步强调了主流的期望，在美国目前，少数族裔作家“承认”他们的亲密生活是为了娱乐，并说明他们表达的方式和内容。然而，尤尼奥尔的叙述也通过一种看似对话（针对“你”）但实际上充当独白的忏悔来集中——然后宽恕——男性的不当行为，从而确立了女性形象。我还审问了 Díaz 的作者采访，并将 Lili Loofbourow 的“男性自我赦免”理念应用于 Díaz 的自传散文“沉默：童年创伤的遗产”（2018 年），其中他揭示了幸存的童年性侵犯，并承认他随后“伤害”亲密的女性伴侣。我认为，无论是尤尼奥尔还是迪亚兹的坦白，都会延续男性的独白，将女性的声音边缘化。