Parenthetical Pillars: The Subtleties of Phrasing and Identity in 'Hunger of Memory' Anonymous 11th Grade

Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical Hunger of Memory outlines his intellectual development from early childhood to adulthood. As the title suggests, Rodriguez recounts and reflects upon the various memories of importance to this development. He simultaneously addresses political topics — arguing against bilingual education and affirmative action — while establishing the story of his own identity as a complex architecture connecting his Mexican-American background to his class to his religion to his body to his profession as a writer. He does this all while switching between either side of various fenestrations separating his public and private lives. Though he discusses each of these pillars distinctly, he complicates his identity and paradoxically constructs an anomalous architecture of a mutable self through intentionally inconsistent argumentation and observable changes in his own language. Ultimately, his identity as a hyper-Americanized Mexican-American forms the most important cornerstone in his confounded self; his uses of parenthetical phrases throughout discussions of other aspects of his identity act as windows between his public and private lives and as solipsistic expressions of the part of himself he can only...