Achievement of Desire by Richard Rodriguez - Literature review Example

Richard Rodriguez came from a Mexican immigrant family which taught him important familial values, and most essentially the value of parents. Yet, when he began aiming high for himself through educational achievements he was forced to forget these values. The significance he placed on his educational pursuit was unusual to his parents and he had to manage this difficulty all by himself. Rodriguez narrated about his detachment from his family, particularly to his parents, as a young boy because of the dissimilarity in their set of values; Rodriguez strongly believed that the values he upholds are much better than those of his parents. Most young people have the chance to persevere or make every effort to surpass their parents’ achievements despite of situations, family background and history, regardless if their parents are achievers or lack education since it is always better to construct your own world instead of your parents making decisions for you. In the case of Rodriguez, his persistence to choose his path further isolated him from his parents; what he really wants is to become completely different from his parents. There are instances in which he felt embarrassed by his parents’ lack of education and inability to speak ‘clean’ and brilliant English in front of his teacher whom he admires so much because of her proficiency in speaking the language. Rodriquez wanted to make a difference for himself because he knows that being a working-class immigrant poses a lot of difficulty in achieving success. For him, his parents are the living proof of this difficulty. Through education Rodriquez tried to escape who he was and to forget what had been for him. He shunned away his parents from his academic success through evading their questions about his activities and achievements in school. He even allowed himself to be swept away by the impersonal world of education and swallow his entire being, both emotionally and cognitively. He permitted his teachers’ authority to replace the value of his parents for him. He was becoming truly an academician, in its superficial sense, and a person remote from his own cultural heritage, and painfully, from his own family. Being a ‘scholarship boy’ Rodriguez became an enthusiastic reader of world-class authors. He willingly took in the major themes and ideas espoused by those brilliant authors he had read, such as Dickens and Plato. He became academically fulfilled for his knowledge was expanding limitlessly. He pursued his desire for success tirelessly until in the end everything he desired became strange to him. He began to realize that he lack perspective and all he does is absorb the perspective of those highly regarded others and take these perspectives as his own. He was indeed a scholarship boy in Hoggart’s description: “a great mimic; a collector of thoughts; not a thinker” (p. 666). In brief, Rodriguez’s educational pursuit and his home and his family are irreconcilable forces in his life. The ‘lavish emotions of home life’ (p. 654) became a hindrance, as seen by Rodriquez, to his ‘school’s trust in lonely reason’ (p. 654). Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to balance these important things in his life and became excessively preoccupied in achieving his desires. In the end, those he took for granted were the ones who cared and accommodated him in his moments of confusion and lost. I think Rodriguez’s rhetorical purpose is to express and inform. Express in a sense that he was narrating his struggles to achieve a better life for himself apart from his family through education. The narration was quite dramatic in some ways because of the elements of emotion embedded in it, specifically wherein Rodriguez’s talks about his family in a rather derogatory manner. It is blatantly shown in the narrative that Rodriguez is embarrassed of his parents; yet, indirectly, Rodriguez in his words and expressions revealed pain in what is becoming of him and his relationship with his parents. He is still protective of his parents and this is witnessed in his effort to remove his parents from the condescending attitude of his teacher towards them. Moreover, the narrative is expressive for the reason that Rodriguez admitted here all his thoughts about his pursuit for academic excellence and his points of view regarding his family. As the narrative progresses, the expressions of Rodriguez progresses as well; from an enthusiastic young boy who loved hiding in the closet just to be alone with his book, to a grade-school student who admired his teacher because of her ‘clean’ English, to a young man who started seeing the world in a new light through academic readings, and to an enlightened grown up man who realized that education has its limits and sometimes it is better to stop for a while and look back at the things gone past and forgotten. The narrative is informative in a sense that Rodriguez provided a vivid picture of the life of a working-class migrant family. Moreover, the narrative made allusions on popular literatures such as those written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and others. In a technical sense, the narrative is informative because it extracted quotes from the book of Richard Hoggarts to support the premises of Rodriguez. In conclusion, I think Rodriguez’s Achievement of Desire is effective because of his use of his own life story, more particularly his struggle for academic success, to convey his perspectives, worldview and self-representation. There is nothing more effective in a literature than the sense of knowing that what you are reading is relevant in real life. Rodriguez expresses and informs. I think Isabelle Allende’s narratives, specifically her The House of the Spirits, are quite similar to Rodriguez’s narrative. Allende also bases her stories from true to life accounts and she as well delves with both individual and family struggles. Richard Rodriguez is a Mexican migrant who has uneducated parents. He was a young boy filled with ambitions and desires for higher education. He was truly nostalgic but this sentiment was obscured by the impersonal nature of his educational pursuit. Yet in the end, Rodriguez did not become the superficial renowned academician that he deeply desires but an educated Mexican born in a working class immigrant family with uneducated parents. References Rodriguez, Richard. The Achievement of Desire, p. 651-671. Read More