Frank Mccourt´s Memoir: Angela's Ashes

An Analysis of Frank McCourt’s Memoir: Angela’s Ashes

Poverty is an experience that can either make or break a person. The constant fear of never knowing when the next meal will be is soul-crushing, and the feeling of lowliness is one that can never be shaken for the rest of one’s life. Every step taken in the direction of wealth is a tremendous one, as the impoverished get so close they can almost taste the safety and comfort of money. As such, the Great Depression was indeed a time of great suffering, a terrible heartache felt around the world, yet none were hit quite so hard as the Irish. A bleak account of life in Irish poverty, Angela’s Ashes, a memoir by Frank McCourt, describes the class discrimination and extreme poverty he and

his family experienced in Depression Era Ireland, using a voice that is equally nihilistic and real.
Frank McCourt was born in New York on August 19, 1930, in the borough of Brooklyn, to Angela Sheehan and Malachy McCourt, a bastard child (biography.com). Pressured into wedlock by Angela’s cousins, Malachy begrudgingly proposed to Angela, as validation for Frank’s birth. After Frank came Malachy, the twins Eugene and Oliver, and Margaret. The entire family lived in a one room apartment, with a lavatory shared by the entire floor. Dirty living quarters, a severe lack of basic necessities, and a drunken father who could barely stand on his feet-- let alone work for a living-- led the McCourt family spiraling down a dreadful, deadly path. McCourt’s parents, grief-stricken by the death of their youngest and only girl, Margaret, and hopelessly struggling to survive in the ghettos of Brooklyn, desperately sought asylum from Angela’s mother in the Emerald Isles. Here, McCourt and his family strained to stay alive in the boggy town of Limerick, Ireland. Unidentifiable diseases snatched Eugene and Oliver from the McCourts and furthered their spiral into madness. As Hitler came to power, the European nations banded together and announced a call to arms to all the men of Europe. McCourt’s father, Malachy, made a half-hearted effort to leave for the war and provide for his family, but once again fell short in a drunken stupor. In England, Malachy mutated into a vagabond, drinking every cent he earned and sleeping on all the park benches in sight, forever leaving his family behind. As a result of this, Angela fell deeper and deeper into depression; and Frank, not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps hoarded every piece of money he earned from odd jobs and found his way to America. Once in the States, he worked as a teacher, and eventually wrote his memoir, Angela’s Ashes.
It is in the very text and dialogue that readers find the realism with which McCourt writes. Every bit of information about his miserable past is straightforward and to the point, so much so that he does not even bother to use quotation marks to signal the speech of a character. Richard Lea, of The Guardian, suggests that the removal of the traditional quotation marks is a way to implicitly portray realism in prose (Lea). By omitting this punctuation, the text flows more naturally, like spoken words. Readers do not have to process the extra information of the markings, and therefore can relate more easily to the text and what is said.
McCourt’s narration of his life can also be considered a realistic work in the way that McCourt chooses his words and presents them. The diction of the individuals in the novel reveals the Irish past of the author, and how the language of those in Frank’s life influenced his thoughts and actions. As Richard Chase states in his book, The American Novel and Its Tradition, “Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact” (qtd. in Campbell). As stated above, McCourt presents his storyline in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact manner, with slight undertones of comedic styling. Even the retelling of his conception is told in a way that keeps it to the point, yet jocular: “With Angela drawn to the hangdog look… there was bound to be a knee-trembler. A knee-trembler is the act itself done up against a wall, man and woman up on their toes, straining so hard that their knees tremble…” (McCourt 15). This is a very real description of sex, and McCourt knows that; nonetheless, he makes an effort to keep the reason for his existence and misery light-hearted, as to not scare the reader off in the first twenty pages.
Another characteristic of realist literature is a detailed description of life in a poor, lower working class family.

Depictions of just how gritty and uncomfortable everyday life was for McCourt are the basis for his novel; without his hardships, there would be no material for his memoir. A reader need but take a quick flip through the book, landing on any page whatsoever, and he or she will find an unpleasant taste of poverty and suffering. A striking example of this is when Frank realizes how extremely hungry his family is, and takes it upon himself to steal rations of food from the local grocer. He knows that what he doing is wrong, yet he cannot bear to see his family in pain. In addition to hunger, the filth in which Frank and his family lives is undeniably disgusting. The first night that the McCourts are in their new Limerick home, the family wakes up to discover fleas nesting in their bed, biting at their flesh: “... we saw the fleas, leaping, jumping, fastened to our flesh. We slapped at them and slapped but they hopped from body to body, hopping, biting” (McCourt 59). Fleas are the epitome of filth and haggardness; and here the McCourts are, their first night in Ireland, and already ravished by fleas. Not to mention the fact that the entire lane shares a single lavatory, where all kinds of questionable filth and foulness is dumped, causing the McCourt residence to smell of feces

year-round.
An extremely prominent theme of Angela’s Ashes is religion and Catholicism.

McCourt says on the very first page of the book, “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood” (1). Catholics have had a long history of being the antagonists. Who can forget the gruesome image conjured up when picturing the Inquisition? The Pear of Anguish, the Rack, the Judas Cradle: all instruments of torture used by the Catholic Church to punish all who did not agree with their antics. In recent years, the Catholic Church has come under fire for the atrocities that priests committed with young altar boys, and the unwillingness of the Pope to acknowledge these crimes. Anyone remember Sinead O’Connor ripping up the picture of the Pope on SNL? Definitely not a good impression of Catholicism. As such, Catholics have been severely hated for many centuries, and although the McCourts live around fellow Catholics, the Church and religion are not depicted well in the novel. Priests are mean, nuns are nasty, and many of the religious folk in Limerick are all around rude. Even those who claim to be the most devout and holy, treat others as scum. Angela’s mother, a God-fearing woman, is bitter and unwilling to help her daughter, classifying it as a burden to be charitable. The St. Vincent de Paul, an obviously religious organization dedicated to giving everything from boots and furniture to struggling families,

seems to operate with ulterior motives; they wish to be seen as generous and charitable, instead of actually living by these rules.
The society of Limerick is one wrought with classism and prejudice toward every human not born in their exclusive circles. Malachy, Sr., is constantly discriminated against because he hails from North Ireland, a fact that is consistently used against him as he tries to find work. The reason for this being that Northern Ireland decided to stay a part of the United Kingdom, whereas the Republic of Ireland completely broke away from the UK, staying independent. Those from the Republic viewed Northerners as traitorous “English brown-nosers.” Limerick citizens in the book are not afraid of being vocal about their dislike of Malachy and his ancestry: “That shows you what can happen when you marry someone from the North for they have no control over themselves up there a bunch of Protestands that they are” (McCourt 45). The most serious of the patriots even go so far as to persecute the most desperate souls of Ireland, who abandoned their Catholic faith simply for a bowl of soup in their time of need, forever branding them the “soupers.” The people of Limerick were a close-minded group of curmudgeons.
It is not hard to see why McCourt would choose to write in such a dreary, realistic manner; his childhood was one long, drawn out nightmare with scarcely a window of hope to gaze out of. McCourt’s father was neglectful, his mother was meek and unwilling, three of his siblings died, and his young self witnessed unimaginable horrors. The Church turned against him, nature turned against him, and God Himself turned against Frank; his view of life was turned from one of childhood hope and innocence, to one of cynicism and realism.