The Achievement Of Desire, By Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez’s essay “The Achievement of Desire” opens with a narration of he, himself—the guest speaker who sees himself in a young student at a ghetto classroom. As the essay builds, Richard Rodriguez uses the excerpts extracted from Richard Hoggart’s literature—“The Uses of Literacy” in each subdivision of his essay to explain the typical characteristics of a “scholarship boy”. And later he tells his experience as a student to evaluate Hoggart’s description of a “scholarship boy”. At certain moments in his essay, Rodriguez also fits himself into Hoggart’s version of a “scholarship boy” to justify the temperament of this certain kind of student. For Hoggart, the writing of a “scholarship boy” is a difficult intellectual work that he

He repeatedly mentions “Your parents must be very proud” (339) to emphasize on the fact that he does not know how to react to such praise until the encounter of Hoggart’s literature—“The Uses of Literacy”. Although Rodriguez’s essay has eased readers to better understand the temperament of a “scholarship boy” there are a few main points in Hoggart’s essay that he neglects. The cultural difference between the working-class and middle-class is actually the focus of Hoggart in his essay. By using the story of a “scholarship boy” who uproots himself from the working-class using his academic success, Hoggart pinpoints the typical ways of life of people from the working-class. At the same time, Hoggart also uses the desires of a “scholarship boy” to describe the appearance of middle-class people. For instance, Hoggart states “He would like to be a citizen of that well-polished, prosperous, cool, book-lined and magazine-discussing world of the successful intelligent middle-class” (247). Henceforth, it is crucial to remember that while Rodriguez is the expert in describing a “scholarship boy,” Hoggart is the greater authority because he is the one who has provided a frame for