The Achievement Of Desire Summary

In “The Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez writes about the experiences that he had as a young boy, where from these experiences he grew into a person that he found distant from his family and from reality. The rift between his family and his education was based on part mostly by negative experiences he had with his family not caring about his achievements. In contrast, his education puts his teachers and mentors, not his parents, on an ungodly pedestal. “The Achievement of Desire” is primarily about Richard’s negative childhood experiences in which he rejected his cultural heritage and his family in favored of a more civilized and elitist viewpoint in the hopes of getting attention. Throughout the whole passage, there are many excerpts

In a rather sad way, he realizes his mistake of devoting basically his whole life to schooling and lacking the social communication skills, through the use of education. A case of this is seen with his questioning who will remember him, “Who besides my dissertation director and a few faculty members, would ever read that I wrote negatively (for that is how this idea first occurred to me): my need to think so much and so abstractly about my parents and our relationship was in itself an indication of my long education.” ( ) The previous statement above can be similar to the story of Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” were similar to Richard is stubborn in his idea of not celebrating Christmas, or in Richard’s case not embracing his family and his cultural heritage. Typically, a person can’t change someone’s viewpoint without a radical idea; a negative can’t be replaced with a much stronger positive force. The negative experiences that Richard’s experience has far more supremacy, then the positive experiences on the given negatives are harder to resolve and in turn he usually associate his family and culture in a rather bad light given these events in