Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Memory Hunger outlines his intellectual development from early childhood to adulthood. As the title suggests, Rodriguez recounts and reflects on various memories important to this development. She simultaneously addresses political topics – arguing against bilingual education and affirmative action – while establishing the story of her identity as a complex architecture that connects her Mexican-American background to her class, her religion, her body, her his profession as a writer. He does this by passing from one side to the other of the various windows that separate his public life from his private one. Although he discusses each of these pillars distinctly, he complicates his identity and paradoxically constructs an anomalous architecture of a changing self through intentionally inconsistent arguments and observable changes in his language. Ultimately, his identity as a hyper-Americanized Mexican-American forms the most important cornerstone of his confused self; his use of parenthetical phrases during discussions of other aspects of his identity act as a window between his public and private lives and as solipsistic expressions of the part of himself that he can only convey through his writing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Rodriguez's descriptions of his early life contain parenthetical phrases that reflect the birth of the clash between his public and private lives, stemming from his early conceptualizations of language. Describing his private domestic life, he keeps them mostly short, using several single words in brackets, amplifying their previous modified element. He recalls that he would “hear [his] mother screaming. . . in Spanish (words)” (16), ironically calling attention to – rather than de-emphasizing – the idea of ​​“words,” thus beginning to show their importance to his development. He already begins to mix his early education with notions of his private racial identity, the relationship of which also contributes to his affinity for language. Yet at the same time, he uses the nature of parenthetical punctuation to separate the two, distinctly referring to his first language, “Spanish,” and “words,” or language in general, as separate entities. He similarly overlaps the public and private components of his identity when he writes that “within the home [he] would resume (assume) [his] place in the family” (16). In this case his “assumes” in brackets redefines the “resume,” creating uncertainty about the nature of his home life; the parentheses are a window into the private interior life of his home, yet he must “assume” this private identity. So he defines his private life in terms of his public audience, of which he is inextricably aware. Evolving from brief expressions of his private life throughout his public struggles, Rodriguez's parenthetical sentences transform into solipsistic expressions of his own struggle to discover his identity but maintain it. an emphasis on the role his writing and understanding of language played in that struggle. Discussing his use of the English language as a child, he “could not believe that the English language was [his] to use,” parenthetically explaining that “[he] didn't want to believe it” (18). This contrast between this disbelief and the absence of desire to believe reflects the solipsistic struggle to convey his sense of identity as a variable structure. Adding layers to his writing and his identity, often redefining his own statements to confuse.