Scholarship Boy

Rodriguez, R.  (1983). Hunger of memory.  New York:  Bantam Dell.  (autobiography)

Chapter 2: The Achievement of Desire (pg. 31-53)

"Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered" (Rodriguez, 36).

"Playfully she ran through complex sentences, calling the words alive with her voice, making it seem that the author somehow was speaking directly to me. I smiled just to listen to her. I sat there and sensed for the very first time some possibility of fellowship between a reader and a writer, a communication, never intimate like that I heard spoken words at home convey, but one nonetheless personal" (Rodriguez, 44).

Throughout the memoir, Rodriguez refers to himself as a scholarship boy. Early on he demonstrates a love for reading when he attempts to read all of those books. He would get frustrated when his family did not relate to his love for reading. At one point, his mother asked him for a book and because she did not read it he decided to take it back. He realized pretty early on that his education was something private to him and could not be combined with his family.

He also struggles with becoming an independent thinker. Although he reads so many books he is only able to recite the ideas that he gets from other people. In order for him to be a true scholarship boy, he has to learn to formulate his own ideas and opinions. We see him evolve from this state of mind by the end of the memoir. He sees his writing as a way for him to express his emotions about life. He says that he would rather write about his personal life for strangers to read rather than tell people that he knows. By this point in the memoir, he has grown into more of a free thinker. He knows that without his education he never would have been able to articulate his experiences.