Douglass did not wish to celebrate The 4th of July because it was celebrating freedom. There were many blacks still enslaved and he dispised how United States celebrated freedom when millions of blacks were still enslaved. Douglass said “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.” He is talking about the black slaves who are still trapped with no freedom
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.”
Answer is A. It develops a shocking and horrifying image of the narrator's experience followed by his attempts to forget what happens.
As the journey goes on, the narrator describes the places he visits as really obscure and sinister, places where he does not want to be. Time drags and every place looks the same, so he unconsciously wants this images to slip out of his memory.
