Hunger Of Memory Analysis

Once, American football player, coach and executive Vince Lombardi said “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand. Hunger of Memory is the story of Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican American who begins his studies in California without knowing English and steps up finishing his studies at a university of prestige. His life is challenging and full of nostalgia and that is what makes the reader truly get the feeling.

In Hunger of Memory, Richard feels a loss, and this is because he gives up his native language; Spanish. He becomes a scholarship boy. In Chapter 2 The Achievement of Desire (Rodriguez 43 – 73) he explains he feels like a scholarship boy “I was a certain kind of scholarship boy, a very good student, but also a bad one. Always successful, always unconfident.” Rodriguez explains the different difficulties balancing life at home with family, and the academic world at school.

While reading, Richard found a book called The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hogart where he founds so many similarities with his own life, he says in a chapter “I found in his description of the scholarship boy,

Rodriguez includes a quote from Hogart’s book about the scholarship boy, "feels himself weighted with knowledge of his own and class situation, which hereafter forbids him the simpler pleasures of his mother and father" (Hogart 246). Then he expresses the lack of community and the problems in his family by saying "My parents and I sat in the kitchen for a conversation. But, lacking the same words to develop our sentences and to shape our interests, what was there to say?" (Rodriguez