Read through a poststructural lens, Aristotle Mendoza is not a coherent, preexisting identity who simply discovers a truth about himself. Instead, Ari is produced and reproduced by language, social signs, and power relations. His first person narration is full of retractions, qualifying clauses, and repeated attempts to name what he feels. These linguistic moves reveal subjectivity as unstable, contingent, and discursive rather than essential. Language does not transparently report an interior truth; it performs identity. Specific moments, for example Ari's conflicting accounts of his family history or the way he alternates between silence and confession, demonstrate that the self is assembled through narrative practices. Ari's sense of masculinity, guilt, and desire shifts depending on the social scene and the words available to him. A poststructural reading foregrounds how cultural discourses about masculinity, ethnicity, and sexuality shape Ari's subject position, and how his narrative work attempts but cannot securely fix that position.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe invites a metafictional reading when it repeatedly meditates on the act of remembering and telling. Ari's narration often pauses to comment on how memory reshapes events, how some scenes are held back and others amplified. Those narrative pauses produce the sense that the book is conscious of itself as a constructed account of coming of age. Friendship, therefore, functions both as subject and medium; the relationship between Ari and Dante is presented not simply as an event but as a text being produced and revised in the act of recollection. This self-reflexivity destabilizes the usual realist idea that a novel transparently represents past life. Instead the story dramatizes how memory and narration produce meaning, and how intimate relationships are themselves archive and fiction. Teachers can use these moments to show how form and content interact, and how Sáenz uses narrative distance and comment to ask who gets to tell which story and how that act changes what counts as truth.

Read with an eye to simulacra, masculinity in Sáenz's novel appears as a set of signs that circulate independently of any original. Ari performs toughness, stoicism, and rage because those signs are available and expected in his social world. Dante answers with different signifiers, including softness and verbal eloquence, which themselves become performances. The novel stages a social field where images of manhood, familial authority, and ethnic stereotypes multiply, becoming hyperreal: they are more real than lived experience and end up governing behavior. Moments when characters mimic cultural scripts, or when public expectations shape private feeling, illustrate how reality is mediated by copies of copies. The border town setting intensifies this effect, since cultural signs from both sides—language, music, masculinity tropes—circulate and collide. A simulacra reading asks readers to see characters as enmeshed in systems of signs rather than as transparent embodiments of fixed traits.

The novel's structure is episodic and nonlinear. Ari's narration is marked by omissions, ellipses, and sudden shifts in focalization. These formal choices invite a reading that considers the narrator unreliable not because he lies, but because trauma, shame, and social pressure fragment his recollection. The story is assembled from shards of experience rather than a continuous chronology. This fragmentation mirrors the characters' inner discontinuities and complicates any simple reading of growth as a linear progression. Teaching from this angle foregrounds how silence functions as a narrative device. The gaps in Ari's account are meaningful; they signal what cannot be easily integrated into story. The unreliable narrator thus becomes a way to represent how adolescence, especially in marginalized communities, resists tidy narrative closure. The effect unsettles readers who expect a single coherent developmental arc.

A conventional coming-out narrative moves from confusion to revelation and then to a resolved identity. Sáenz refuses that simple teleology. Instead he disperses the moment of recognition across scenes, gestures, and ruptures, making revelation iterative rather than climactic. Ari's journey is not a single epiphany but a series of hesitant articulations, public and private. Deconstruction exposes the binary assumptions undergirding the traditional coming-out story, such as the idea that identity is static once named, or that there is a single correct path to authenticity. This reading also locates the cultural institutions that police and produce normative narratives, including family, school, and community. Sáenz's novel shows how these institutions both constrain and enable identity work. The effect is a textured portrayal of maturation that resists the tidy closure of many YA plots. Students can use a deconstructive approach to ask how narratives of selfhood are constructed, and who benefits when we insist on linear, normative arcs.