Throughout ‘Hunger of Memory’, the readers develop a sense of who Richard Rodriguez is. It becomes interesting and rather easy to note that he has spent most of his childhood life in ‘double’, whether it is from a linguistic perspective or an educational perspective. He gradually separates himself from his Spanish -Speaking family, while, forming a close bond with this English-Speaking public. However, what seems to be a bit tricky is how to identify an individual who undergoes such transition of a complete assimilation. According to Richard Rodriguez, the essayist, Richard Hoggart successfully developed an idea that seemed to define Rodriguez’ life completely. “Then one day, leafing through Richard Hoggart’s The uses of Literacy, I found, in his description of the scholarship boy, myself” (Rodriguez 48). Here, Rodriguez implies that he must be a ‘scholarship boy’ simply because the descriptions of a ‘Scholarship boy’ matches his childhood being.
To provide an illustration, Hoggarts, according to Rodriguez, stresses that “With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s
…show more content…
Rodriguez’s education pushed him away from his private life, however the intimacy was still there. Rodriguez still loved and cherished his family values unconditionally. Rodriguez figured out that “Intimacy is not created by a particular language; it is created by intimates” (32). Rodriguez noted that that the greatest changes in his was mostly of language. On the contrary, Hoggart described that the ‘scholarship boy’ came to forget about his family life. “He cannot afford to admire his parents. He permits himself embarrassment at their lack of education” (51). Richard Rodriguez, in overall can be identified as an epitome of the ‘Scholarship boy’, something very exceptional in regardes to self-identity and academic