By being privy to Granny’s death, the reader can infer much about her life. The title describes the enormous hurt and humiliation that has secretly festered in her mind and heart for sixty years. Her great pride was devastated by her jilting; although she married a good man, raised a family, and managed a farm by herself after her husband’s death, she never totally got over the shock and disappointment of George’s rejection. The fact that she has saved George’s letters suggests how much he continued to mean to her in her heart and how the pain of her jilting remained with her for sixty years.
I don’t think so, it’s not really comparing anything
Since Richard Rodriguez is a writer that emphasized his origins as the son of Mexican immigrants, but nevertheless was raised by the American academia and society. In the essay of Hunger of Memory, he stated how after being part of a socially disadvantaged family, that although it was very close, the extreme public alienation, made him feel in disadvantage to other children as he grew up. Due to this, 30 years later he pays essential attention to how from being a socially aligned to a Mexican immigrant child, he grew up to be an average American man. He analyses his persona from that social point of view of being different in the race but similar in the customs. Hence, the author finds himself struggling with his identity.
A good example of it, it’s the manner he introduces his last name. A Spanish rooted last name, which may seem difficult to pronounce to a native English speaker. The moment the author introduces himself and tries to clarify its pronunciation to an American person, he mentions how his parents are no longer his parents in a cultural sense.
His parents belong to a different culture, his parents grew up in a different context, they were raised with different values and ways; in that sense, Rodriguez culturally sees himself as an American, his education was different to his parents’. He doesn’t see his parents as his culture-educators, he adamantly rejects the idea that he might be able to claim "unbroken ties" to his inherited culture to the ones of White Americans who would anoint him to play out for them some drama of ancestral reconciliation. As the author said, “Perhaps because I am marked by the indelible color they easily suppose that I am unchanged by social mobility, that I can claim unbroken ties with my past.”
